When James LeesMilne died in late December, not all his obituarists were equally kind. Lees-Milne's mistake had been to publish last year a volume of diaries dating from the mid-1970s. These revealed a dyspeptic, misanthropic and intermittently racist individual, ill at ease with the age in which he lived and completely intolerant of the social changes taking place around him. During a particularly bad outbreak of IRA attacks in Britain, for example, he proposed the repatriation of every Irish citizen. This book is the perfect antidote to the late diaries, revealing an altogether kinder, more civilised and humane person and helping to explain why Lees-Milne was one of the most widely liked men of his generation. It is also a complete enchantment, one of those brief works of autobiography for which that over-employed term "classic" may justifiably be used.
First published in 1970, Another Self offers an absorbing image of England in the early decades of this century, often splendidly funny and occasionally deeply moving. As secretary to the National Trust's country house committee James Lees-Milne did more than anyone else to save many of England's greatest properties for posterity.
He was the author of a number of excellent books on architectural history and biography, as well as four wonderful volumes of diaries covering his life from 1942 to 1949. For all of these he merited generous praise, but nothing is so likely to secure his memory as An- other Life.
Born in 1908, Lees-Milne was the son of a Worcestershire squire, for whom all art was anathema - "he turned puce in the face and fumed at the mere mention of it" - and a romantic, dreamy mother devoted to her elder son.
The emotion was reciprocated: one of the most amusing stories told here is of 18-year-old LeesMilne helping his beloved parent elope with a balloonist even though he thought her beau "an odious little man" and "about the worst of her many bad choices I had yet encountered". Little about the Lees-Milne household appears to have been normal, yet it is all described as though everyone might be accustomed to intensive feuding with the local vicar or the accidental poisoning of a gardener. While the book follows an essentially chronological line, in form it is primarily anecdotal, with the recital of one tragi-comic event succeeding another. The character of Lees-Milne pere was in many respects similar to that of Nancy Mitford's much-chronicled father; despite being reasonably wealthy, he decided his son, after leaving school, should learn to earn his own keep.
Accordingly, having temporarily lost his mother and ally to the aforementioned balloonist, James Lees-Milne found himself driven to London and enrolled at Miss Blakeney's Stenography School for Young Ladies where he spent a year learning shorthand and typing. His father was under the impression that these skills would lead to a directorship in the city and was "aghast" when no such position materialised. Eventually, thanks to the connivance of his now-returned mother, Lees-Milne managed to secure a place at Oxford and, while his time there was a disappointment to him, it was during those years that he discovered where his real interests lay.
Invited to a dinner one evening at a country house in Oxfordshire, he was appalled when his drunken host took a hunting crop to the pictures before firing a rifle at statues on the terrace. That evening "I vowed that I would devote my energies and abilities, such as they were, to preserving the country houses of England". Another Self scarcely touches on Lees-Milne's time as an architectural preservator, presumably since this has been so thoroughly covered by a number of his other books. The work closes with a tale typical in its sense of being too extraordinary for truth.
During the second World War, thanks to a crossed line, LeesMilne struck up conversation on the telephone with an unknown woman. They rapidly discovered compatible natures and for the next year spoke every night without ever meeting or learning each other's names and addresses.
Then suddenly her number became unavailable and after a few days' silence an operator told him that the home of his mystery soulmate had been totally destroyed by a German bomb. He was then offered her name. "`Thank you,' I said, `for your help. I would much rather you didn't. So please, please don't.' And I rang off."
Robert O'Byrne is an Irish Times columnist
