Letters of Antony Lytton - Chapter VI

 

Antony Skiing

Knebworth House Archives

As a child, Antony had enjoyed skiing as a pastime, but during the 1923/4 season, he took downhill racing seriously, and competed in the race for the British Ski Championship.  During his visit to Murren in January 1924, he wrote –

“Yesterday I won the Kandahar at Murren, and being a bloody fool with a much swollen head and too much ego in my cosmos I have been prevailed upon to come here and go in for the British Ski Championship………….. Tomorrow is the Slalom race, and the day after the Championship race.  There are no trains and we have to climb about 3,500-4000 feet and race down, which is unpleasant and almost intolerable. Also there are many good runners to compete with, and I wish I had stayed at Murren, but I always was damned conceited!….. I can’t write.  I am too happy.  Life is divine.  Sun and skiing, it’s all too perfect, but there’s only a week to go now.  Oh how I have loved it ….”

He found it impossible to settle back at Oxford, arguing in his letters

“If I’m here for a purpose, what the hell is it, and how do I set about it? But if not, then why, when the only thing that I want to be doing is skiing, am I sitting in my room at Oxford writing to you.  By being at Oxford when I might be in Switzerland, am I fulfilling the job which God has given me to do?……. What I really feel is that, if on a pair of skis in Switzerland I forgot everything except the joy of living, and the moment I get back here I sit down and write a long morbid letter on the object of life, Well, why is God’s name not stay on skis?”

But boxing continued to be his main resource, and although the training was irksome, it helped to keep him fit. He was selected to box for Oxford against Cambridge, and though he succeeded in winning his fight, he broke his thumb, keeping it in plaster for a fortnight.  Returning to Knebworth for a vacation at the end of April 1924, he wrote to his mother, still in India –

 “Here I am in the nursery at Knebworth writing to you.  And such a Knebworth too!  Bathed in the most glorious sunshine we have seen for years and looking beyond words lovely, as it does in June, although there are no flowers…….. This place has the call of home so much more strongly than even I had ever imagined….. Every now and then one comes up against a very old friend.  A picture that one has brushed one’s teeth in front of for centuries! …. The Manor House may one day be a home, but at present Knebworth, and Knebworth alone, has that intoxicating influence on me.  I think my heart will break with bliss when I see the last stranger go, and we are all once more united and living here”.