Dawn Chorus

Sharing her family history of unique characters Joan Wyndham explores her ancestors' experiences of bygone eras at home and at war. Starting with her aristocrat grandfather who built a vast Victorian country house in Wiltshire entirely of green granite and boasting forty bedrooms and a kitchen so far from the dining room that a miniature railway track had to be built to carry food from one place to the other! Drawing such varied house guests as prime minister Arthur Balfour Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones and Oscar Wilde and Bosie this was a society where weekends were set aside for bed hopping. This was accepted provided you stuck to your own class though made the Wyndham family tree somewhat complicated. And then there was Joan Wyndham's aunt ''a perfectly normal upper-class girl devoted to show jumping who ran away with a black lesbian actress and lived the rest of her life in Harlem''.