In My Father's House

''Dear Thrumpton, how I miss you tonight,'' wrote George Seymour in 1944, when he was aged twenty-one. But the object of his affection was not a young woman, but a house -- ownership of which was then a distant dream.

But he did eventually acquire Thrumpton, a beautiful country house in Nottinghamshire, and it was in this idyllic home that Miranda Seymour grew up. But her upbringing was far from i...