A HORSE drinking tea in a drawing room furnished with grand antique furniture. A man riding naked in the grounds of a country house. A folly built in the shape of a phallic symbol.

It could be part of a painting by Salvador Dali but it all really happened at Faringdon House during the 1920s and 1930s house parties of the eccentric Lord Berners and his gay lover, ‘Mad Boy’ Robert Heber-Percy.

Oxford Mail:

Faringdon House

Now Heber-Percy’s grand-daughter Sofka Zinovieff, 52, who inherited the house, has written the story in The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother and Me. It describes the stifling upper-class society Berners and Herber-Percy grew up in, then rebelled against.

Heber-Percy’s brief wartime marriage to society girl Jennifer Fry astonished their contemporaries. But she discovered from her grandmother Jennifer’s diaries she was disappointed to be rejected by her husband so quickly, although she knew he had a gay lover.

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The Cambridge University graduate said: “Robert was so young when he got involved with Berners and I think she hoped he would change. I think it was not a calculated move to get married, from either of them.

“I always had it in the back of my mind to write about Faringdon, but the time never seemed right. I thought I might move back and write something, but the finances never worked out.”

Oxford Mail:

Lord Berners

Now she is back to tell the tale. The book recalls her amazement at its multi-colour doves, crystal chandeliers, gilt mirrors, glass domes with stuffed birds.

Aristocrats the Mitfords, authors H.G. Wells and Evelyn Waugh, and Russian composer Ivor Stravinsky were among those who attended its parties.

In 1950, when Lord Berners died, Heber-Percy inherited the Faringdon House and Estates.

She wrote: “My mother was not enthusiastic about the glamour or impressed by the famous old friends. She associated the place with snobbery, camp bad behaviour and lack of love and affection.”

Oxford Mail:

The multi-coloured doves of Faringdon House

Mrs Zinovieff, who inherited the house in 1987, aged 25, added: “He was not called the Mad Boy for nothing.

“I don’t know if we would have got on well if we had really had to see more of each other, but I only spoke to him at weekend house parties.

“He didn’t have a good relationship with his daughter. I think it was a naughty whim to leave the house to me. I’m sure that he cackled with glee.”

For the past two decades, the house has been rented out while she lived abroad.

Mrs Zinovieff, who married Greek diplomat Vassilis Papadimitriou in 2001, said: “This will be the first time we have lived there as our home.

“It’s still got a mid-20th century feel and I have always felt attracted to the quirky, eccentric aspect of the house.”

Mrs Zinovieff will appear at Blenheim Palace Literary Festival on September 27 and Wantage Betjeman Literary Festivalon October 28.

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