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From The Sunday Times May 11 2008
My country-house parties have always suffered from one slight problem - I don't have a country house.
I do have a cottage in Dorset, but several factors make it less than ideal. I will gloss over the fitful heating, the single shower, the mountains of books that could bury the unwary guest. Size is the problem. In my house, four guests are a crowd, six are mayhem and eight require a marquee in the garden.
I once had 16 to dinner. The dining table, extended with desks, tea chests and a laundry basket, seemed to run from the front door to the back. My chief memory of the evening was of women in inappropriate skirts climbing over the table to get to their seats. I wondered what kind of thoughtless moron had done the seating plan, before remembering the thoughtless moron was me.
It was high time, I felt, for the grown-up version of the country-house party, one that takes place in a proper country house, somewhere with long drawing rooms for pre-dinner drinks, with four-poster beds and croquet lawns and a backstairs for creeping adulterers. I was surprised to learn that there were no end of large manor houses willing, for a fee, to allow any sort of ragamuffins the run of the place. I settled on Bradley House in Wiltshire - it slept 21 people in gracious ensuite style without anyone having to resort to the sofa - and began calling friends.
When we turned up, we thought we had died and gone to Gosford Park. A fine Georgian manor set in rolling parkland, Bradley House comes equipped with all the paraphernalia of privilege - grand entrance halls, sweeping staircases, baronial fireplaces, windows so tall you could ride a horse through them, and bathtubs in which you could do lengths. Bradley House is the kind of place that makes you wonder how you have survived all these years without 25,000 acres, a peerage and a family motto.
The drawing room is larger than most London flats. A fire crackles in the library, where deep sofas await guests inclined to curl up with a good book, or one another. The music room is a children's domain of games and pianos and DVDs. Beneath Flemish tapestries and silver candelabra, the dining room table is a polished runway laid for 24. Across the hall, the kitchen is the size of a small barn. It contains the two essentials for any self-respecting country-house kitchen - a sofa and an Aga, as well as three acres of counter space. Beyond lies a reassuring hinterland of butler's pantries, laundry rooms, gun rooms, cloakrooms and backstairs.
The family seat of the Dukes of Somerset, Bradley House was built in 1680. Originally, it rivalled Longleat, its neighbour, but some family crisis in the early 19th century necessitated pulling down two wings, reducing the house from palatial to merely very large. The family are the Seymours, who were granted their title by Henry VIII when he took a fancy to the young Jane Seymour. He invited her to become lady-in-waiting to Anne Boleyn. Eleven days after Anne's execution, Henry married Jane. Their marital bed, with its dense oak carvings, is upstairs in the Bow Bedroom.
Family portraits abound. The gloomiest line the central staircase. There is Sir John Seymour, Jane's father, a lugubrious fellow in charge of an intimidating beard. Clearly a man with more facial hair than sense, it was he who offered the hand of his daughter to the uxoricidal king. Then again, perhaps it was the old wheeze of sacrificing the girls so the boys could get on. Opposite is the painting of the male heir that Jane produced - the young Edward VI. He is watched over by Jane's brothers - Edward, who became Lord Protector to the boy king, and Thomas, who became High Admiral.
Cars began to purr up the curving gravel drive, and the guests made their entrances like characters in an Agatha Christie. I doled out bedrooms with giddy abandon. The bachelor barrister was assigned the Garden Room at the end of the west wing, where he could conduct any dangerous liaisons with a degree of privacy. The bisexual novelist was given the bed in which Henry VIII bedded Jane Seymour.
The historian was offered the Italian bedroom with its fine orientalist prints, on the grounds that she had grown up in Istanbul - sadly, they turned out to be prints of Cairo. The journalist with the frisky young wife was given the Park Bedroom, with the chandelier poised above the four-poster bed. The glamorous divorcee was installed within corridor-creeping distance of the bachelor barrister. Children were dispatched to nursery bedrooms on the second floor, where they embarked upon a game of hide-and-seek that ran longer than The Sopranos.
We spent three blissful days in Bradley's elegant bubble. The house managed the neat trick of being grand without being in the least formal. I realised that this was how a manor house would be if I owned one myself: full of books and comfy sofas and log fires. There were piano duets in the music room, chess games half-finished in the library, a great gaggle of muddy wellies inside the back door and a kitchen that was the warm heart of the house.
Every morning while the others slept, I went about the house opening the heavy curtains and the tall wooden shutters, a ritual that took a good quarter of an hour. As light flooded into the rooms, the view was revealed piece by piece - the curving drive encircling the fountain, the flat croquet lawn, the mature trees of a Wiltshire parkland, the decorative sheep on the far side of the ha-ha and the distant pastures rising to the heights of Brimstone Hill. Every evening, we had drinks in the Drawing Room in front of a roaring fire before we repaired to boisterous candlelit meals at the long dining table.
Nobody had to climb over the table to get to their seat. Nobody had to sleep on the sofa. Nobody could remember such a wonderful house or such a fine house party. And nobody wanted to leave.