an article by Cassandra Jardine from the Daily Telegraph, Thursday, Sept. 3rd, 1998.

LADY VIOLET Powell opens the door to The Chantry, her rounded, open face wreathed in smiles. I am a little early, which comes as a great relief to her; she wants our meeting to finish by lpm sharp, in time for her husband's luncheon. The Powells do not so much dance to the music of time as let its soothing routines govern their lives.

Across the hall of the Georgian house lies the drawing room where Anthony Powell used to receive literary pilgrims at 2.30pm precisely. They would come not only to pay homage to the last survivor of his generation of writers (Greene, Waugh and Orwell were contemporaries) but also to solve the great conundrum of his most celebrated work: who is the model for Widmerpool? Powell's cloth-bound volumes of Burke's are still in place on one side of the fire place, and his novels are lined up on the other. The view over the Mendips which so distracted him that he chose to write upstairs, where he could see only a yew tree is as lovely as ever. But his place on the sofa is now occupied by, dozens of needlepoint cushions. "My handiwork," notes Lady Violet.

Anthony will not be present, she says, because he is not well. Since a fall three years ago, his health has deteriorated and he now needs 24 hour help. However, he is not too gloomy; although his eye sight is poor, he can read and write a little, and he has an enormous amount "stored up in his mind".

"I expect you'd like to meet him later," Lady Violet surmises. "He enjoys visitors but he is 92, and one must make allowances." In the mean time, his presence next door in the dining room is evident from the spasmodic bellowing noises that emanate from behind the closed door.

In the past, Lady Violet would mark the close of her husband's audiences by appearing with the tea tray at 4pm prompt. But today, it is she who is centre stage, with the imminent publication of her third volume of autobiography, The Departure Platform. The prospect of answering questions worries her, she says, because her sentences are "inconclusive". To aid communication, she tries to push our armchairs closer together.

Given her 86 years, this may seem like too much exertion, but she is used to being regarded as young and hale. "All the rest of my family are over 90, and in different states of disintegration," she says, referring to her three surviving Pakenham siblings - Lord Longford, Lady Pansy Lamb and Lady Mary Clive. "But Frank (Lord Longford) goes to the House of Lords very regularly it's his home; Pansy, who lives in Rome, still shows people around St Peter's. So there is some dashing about."

Her generation of the Anglo-lrish family is remarkable not only for longevity, but also for putting pen to paper. The Pakenham/Longford clan (including her brother's wife, Elizabeth Longford, and their children, Antonia Fraser and Rachel Billington, have between them written more than 165 books.

Lady Violet's own tally stands at 12 - including biographies, a Jane Austen compendium and a companion to her husband's 12-volume work, A Dance to the Music of Time. She has never been as lauded as some of her relations, but this appears not to trouble her. "Feeling that one ought to be doing better at something never came into my equation," she says. "I have never felt the need to be someone in my own right." Instead, her role has been that of the wife who puts the great man first, the ever-present "V" of her husband's Journals.

"Inconveiently", inspiration comes to her in the evenings and, rather than annoy her husband by typing, she writes in longhand.

Out of deference to him, too, she has held up publication of this book for three years: "Obviously, it would have been undesirable for it to come out at the same time as his Journals.

As a diarist, Anthony Powell is opinionated and often savage. He calls Graham Greene's books "absurdly overrated"; Virginia Woolf is "humourless, envious and spiteful"; Nabokov "pretentions", Laurie Lee "utterly unreadable" and Auden and his gang "woolly minded".

Lady Violet, howeer, does not have a bad word to say about anybody - except, occasionally, herself. Lady Violet Bonham-Carter, she notes, always made her feel unworthy of sharing her Christian name. It is always others who "come top in looks" or who have, as she observes of the late Lady Glenconner, "super-excellent taste".

Her own dress sense, she says, is and always has been dull. Earlier pictures show her sensibly clad in cardigans and scarves, looking rather less glamorous than some of the other women in her circle, such as ambassadress Evangeline Bruce or Cyril Bruce or Cyril connolly's wife, Barbara Skelton.

The Departure Platform begins in London; Anthony Powell worked in military intelligence during the war and, when it was over, the couple returned to their house near Regent's Park. there, their children, Tristram and John, Played alongside the infant Jane Asher, with her "Pre-Raphaelite hair", and the young Joan Collins, whose allure caused Lady Violet to remark, "The girl who has just passed would get off with man, worman or child."

In 1952, the Powells moved to the Chantry, a Georgian house in Somerset which formed the backdrop to their ceaseless social round. But they also dined in Paris with Nancy Mitford, who hated going out lest her lover should call, and house-partied with the Devonshires, the Baths and the Wellingtons; and when they took their sons out from Eton, it was to go to Osbert Lancaster's house.

The book's theme is Lady Violet's emergence as a writer. It begins with a palmist prophesying that her life will take a new direction and ends with Heinemann's acceptance of her first volume of authobiography - although the editor notes that it is "deplorably lacking in sex, scandal or bad taste".

Lady Violet is clearly pleased with this comment; the closest she gets to being racy in this book is a pasing observation that suspender belts keep you warm. She entirely agrees with her husband's view that "all sex life sooner or later lands you ....trouble", and chooses to ignore the subject.

She also ignores or makes light of all unpleasantness. She tells me of a bombing during the war in which a neighbour and her children were killed; the tragedy left Lady Violet "nervously reduced", but she leaves it out of the book.

She glides, too, over the "shock" of her younger sister's deth at the age of 44 from breast cancer. As for world events, they scarcely impinge: "Ireland is notorious, "she writes, not for political tensions but for "the distances that are travelled to social events".

During their long marriage, the Powells have rached a kind of symbiosis. Anthony, who as a young man felt socially excluded from the smartest circles, has benefited from Lady Violet's authomatic entrée; she seems to delight in sharing, but not often expressing, his forthright views.

They met when she was 22 and he was 28 - first at her sister Pansy's London house and then while staying with her eldest brother, Eddie, at Pakenham, County Westmeath. Violet, who admired Powell's work, asked him to read aloud to her from the novel he was writing. The couple in 1934.

"We began a conversation which has continued unabated until this day," she has said. The secret of their happiness, she says, is shared interests - but her unwavering support and belief in hisgenius must also have contributed.

Lady Violet Pakenham was born in 1911, the fifth of the Earl of Longford's six children. Her father was killed in the Dardanelles when she was three, and her mother ws in constant pain from arthritis. "She could be great fun, and she was enormously brave, but uncertainty about how she would react to things made for a fraught relationship."

She and her sister Julia (only a year younger) watched from the sidelines as their four older siblings fought incessantly. "There was constant turmoil and I realised very early on that being good-natured gave me a power base in the family."

She found the endless political arguments particularly "hard to bear": her eldes brother was an Irish nationalist; he rmother was strongly pro-English; and then there was Frank, who "went over" from the Conservatives to theSocialists around the time their mother died in 1933. Lady Violet's own politics are Conservative and, to avoid friction, she has never discussed Lord Longord's campaign to free Myra Hindley with him = although she did tell her brother that she "couldn't see the purpose" of his anti-pornography campaign.

Literary activity became the family's way of releasing tensions. Her elder siblings put together magazines from an early age and Violet followed suit, editing one to which Julia was the sole contributor.

The provenance of this literary drive fascinateds her. "Neither of my parents wrote, but my mother shared blood with Jane Asten, and my father shred blood with Maria Edgeworth and her nephew, Thomas Lovell Beddoes. I can't help feeling there is something in the collusion of the two lines."

Many of the wormen in the family went to Oxford, but Violet did not even try - she feared her "uneven education" at the hands of a governess would not qualify her. "I wanted to have a jolly good time," she says, so she went to parties, hunted, played polo and supported herself with occasional journalistic pieces for the Evening Standard.

Gentle as she appears, she can be a "pretty fiar tigress" in her hsuabnd's defence. "I am not as good-natured as I seem," she says, "I'm just good at covering up my ill-nature."

Anthony, for his part, has never said a disprespectful word about her in public, and the final sentence of his last Journal is a realisation of his dependence on her. At times, in his cantankerous way, he has perhaps been a bully,but Lady Violet does not apper unhappy: Anthony is her life's work.

As I get up to leave, she gently opens the door to the dining room, revealing the writer sitting a few yards away from a giant bronze bust of hs jowly features, which has been said to reflect the outsize dimensions of his ego. powell is seated in his wheelchair, wwearing pyjamas and awarm striped dressing gown, with a pile of books by his side.

"What do you want?" he asks, lifting his gaze from the Court and Social columns of The Daily Telegraph to glare. Violet explains that I have come to see her, but also wish to meet him. "Well, now you've met me," he snaps, returning to his reading.

"Dreadful barking," Lady Violet mutters as she closes the door, apologising profusely. But one senses that she thinks smoothing over such moments are a small price to pay for living with a "genius". top of page