Army and Navy Child My earliest, indeed happiest, memories are bound up with the Army and Navy Stores -- not a shop selling surplus camouflage gear but a once celebrated London department store, which my father had helped to found and continued, as vice chairman, to run very efficiently until his death. As a four-year-old, I longed for Thursdays to come round. My father would return from his weekly board meeting with the toy department''s finest electric train or toy motorcar or, best of all, a building set -- anything to gratify the son and heir he was so proud of having produced at the age of seventy. I also enjoyed going to the imposing Victoria Street store, where my father had set up the best food halls and wine and cigar departments of any store in London and, much to my delight, a zoo department, where I got to play with the monkeys. The staff treated me like a little prince and hung a framed photograph of me in one of the elevators. Even my mother turned out to have an Army and Navy provenance. Not that she was very forthcoming about it; however, she filled me in on my father''s role in the great enterprise she always referred to as "the Stores." My father had been the youngest of a group of twelve subalterns who had pooled their resources and, around 1870, formed a cooperative society for the wholesale purchase of provisions for their mess as well as for their personal requirements.

Yorkshire hams and jars of Stilton, cases of claret and port and Madeira (for elevenses with the requisite slice of seed cake) would follow my father to Africa in the 1870s and 1880s, where he battled Ashantis and Kaffirs and Zulus and helped his friend Kitchener defeat the Khalifa at Omdurman. In the South African War, he became Quartermaster-General and was popular with the troops for a revolutionary innovation, refrigerated meat. After being decorated by Queen Victoria and knighted by Edward VII, he retired and devoted his logistical skills to transforming the cooperative society of his youth into a phenomenally successful department store. At its height -- between 1890 and 1940 -- the Army and Navy Stores was more than a mere emporium: it was a key cog in the machinery of the Empire. Besides the flagship store in London, which supplied the British establishment with everything it could possibly want, the Stores had outlets in the principal army and navy bases Aldershot, Portsmouth, and Plymouth for the convenience of people in the services. But the two greatest jewels in the Stores'' crown were the enormous branches in Calcutta and Bombay, which functioned as travel agents, bankers, caterers, undertakers, and insurance brokers, as well as purveyors of the pith helmets, thunder-boxes, plum puddings, and all the other myriad things listed in the Army and Navy''s catalogue, which ran to more than a thousand pages. This catalogue was the bible of the British Raj. Kipling''s Mrs.

Vansuythen and Mrs. Hauksbee would have been unable to function without it. The loss of the Empire after World War II would eventually deprive the Army and Navy Stores of its imperial luster. Bomb damage made matters worse. To repair the building, the Stores employed a construction company that turned out to be a subsidiary of their principal rival, Harrods. This strategy allegedly enabled Harrods to take over the Stores and reduce it to the downmarket establishment it remains today. When he was almost seventy, my dashing, surprisingly liberal father caused a stir by falling in love with one of the Stores'' employees, an attractive thirty-five-year-old woman of much warmth and humor called Patty Crocker, whose job was to retouch photographic portraits. Thanks to her training as a miniaturist, she was able to whittle inches off the waists of stout matrons in court dress and add a lifelike sparkle to the expressions of loved ones lost in the recent war.

Horrified at first by her boss''s advances, the fetching retoucher soon capitulated and married the elderly though still seductive vice chairman in 1923. They were idyllically happy, especially when I was born to them in 1924. A daughter arrived the following year, and another son four years later. In July 1929, my father died of a stroke at the age of seventy-five, brought on, I suspect, by all this autumnal fathering. I was five at the time. His death hit me very hard -- all the harder because my mother told me that he had gone off to South Africa to visit old battlefields. Death would have been easier to accept than this fictitious desertion. Seventy years later, I still miss him.

Unfortunately, my father had focused his organizational skills on the Stores rather than on his own fortunes. He had saved relatively little and allowed our once thriving family business -- a private bank that managed the finances of an ever diminishing number of Indian princes -- to fall into the hands of a racist relative. The sale of my father''s large, ugly villa at the top of a hill near the Crystal Palace -- a perfect venue for one of Sherlock Holmes''s cases -- generated enough money for my mother to buy a small house in South Kensington and educate us children, but not enough to give us much of a start in life. Shortly after my father''s death, my mother made another ill-advised but well-intentioned decision. She packed me off to a horrendous boarding school, for no better reason than that my cousin Maurice had been a pupil there twenty years before. Unbeknownst to my mother, Maurice -- a fervent left-wing journalist of anarchic wit -- had loathed the place and was in the process of writing a polemical attack on private education in the form of a roman à clef about it. And then, unbeknownst to me, the book was published, and I became the catalyst of the masters'' indignation. Classes would be kept in "because of Richardson," and I would be left dangling by the wrists from a hook in the ceiling, my shrieks disregarded by those in authority.

For an entire term I was "sent to Coventry," which meant that the other boys were not allowed to speak to me. Appeals to my loving, uncomprehending mother were met with injunctions to "be a little man -- cousin Maurice loved the place." Unable to stand the bullying any longer, I took advantage of what I had precociously perceived as my mother''s weakest spot. I told her -- quite untruthfully -- that after her previous visit to the school, the headmaster''s wife was overheard to say that Lady Richardson was not her idea of a lady. I was instantly removed to a more serious school, where, after ice-cold baths at dawn, pupils were given Latin dictionaries and expected to translate ten lines of Milton into hexameters and pentameters. My family''s anomalous circumstances were the more puzzling for being unmentionable. My father''s formidable spinster sisters -- Aunts Ella, Alice, and Maude -- lived in a big house at Blackheath, a beautiful, unspoiled area of south London, where my grandfather (born in 1814) had owned land that is still called "Richardson''s fields." They played a lot of croquet, said "ain''t" and dropped their g''s -- "we''re goin'' for a turn on the heath" -- like fashionable people a hundred years earlier.

My mother''s sisters, Auntie Louie and Auntie Vi, lived very differently in a snug little semi-detached house in depressing Streatham, where they treated us to scrumptious high teas of bread-and-dripping, bubble-and-squeak, and toad-in-the-hole in their funky kitchen. Why then did my mother and her sisters have such a stash of linen embroidered with coroneted R''s? I was a nosy child and soon discovered that the R stood for Rosebery or Rothschild. I fantasized that I was illegitimate -- maybe Jewish. When asked about these things, my mother blushed. I was sixteen before she divulged the fact that my grandmother had been lady''s maid to Hannah Rothschild, who had married Lord Rosebery. Was she light-fingered? I asked. No, the Roseberys had been open-handed: after Hannah Rosebery died, my grandmother had been allowed to take whatever mementos she wanted from her bedroom. Other members of my mother''s family had been gamekeepers or butlers at Mentmore or one or other of the Rothschild estates in the Thames Valley.

One of them had even claimed to have heard Lord Rosebery utter his famous after-dinner dismissal of his Rothschild relations, "Children of Israel, back to your tents!" Far from being dismayed by my mother''s revelation, I was rather proud. To have worked for such exigent employers, my maternal relations must have been very good at whatever it was they did. Over the years my upstairs-downstairs background has proved, if anything, an advantage. I like to think it has enabled me to see things simultaneously from very different angles, like a cubist painter, and arrive at sharper, more ironical perceptions. At thirteen I went to Stowe, the youngest and least traditional of England''s public schools. The magnificence of the buildings -- Stowe is one of the largest and stateliest of English houses -- made up for the degradation endemic to all boys'' schools of the period. Everyday exposure to Vanbrugh''s and Adam''s façades and Capability Brown''s landscaping engendered a taste for eighteenth-century architecture, which developed into a passion and provided the following pages with a subplot. A special veneration for the grottoes and temples that dotted the park resulted from their being the scenes of my first sexual experiences.

One of these escapades ended ignominiously. A friend and I were caught on a rug in a distant folly by the Hunt Club: the club''s pack of hounds had mistakenly followed our scent. There was a lot of ribald ragging, but the urbane, supposedly gay headmaster, who must have heard about it, failed to take punitive action. Stowe''s greatest advantage, for me at least, was its progressive art school. This was.