Was the bounder who partied in a coconut codpiece with Princess Margaret my grandpa?
It was exactly this time three years ago. I was living in Norfolk for a stint, writing my third novel in a dilapidated house on the edge of the marshes, darting into town whenever I needed milk, bread or a galvanising treat of potted shrimps from the Old Etonian fishmonger (North Norfolk is like that). I’d become friends with the lovely lady in the bookshop, who told me all sorts of things. One young local, Prince George, had recently come in with his mother and bought a book about dinosaurs, for example.
But there was a particular air of excitement whenever I stepped into the shop this time three years ago, because another local had recently published a book which was doing rather well. So well, in fact, that the 87-year-old local was shortly to appear on Graham Norton’s BBC One show alongside Helena Bonham Carter and Olivia Colman. The local was Lady Glenconner and the book was a memoir of her life, called Lady in Waiting.
“She says your grandparents are in her book,” warned the lady who owned the bookshop. Lady Glenconner had been in that morning and Kate, the owner, had explained that there was another writer lurking in the area. This revelation made me nervous. I knew that my grandfather had connections to Mustique, the Caribbean island that Lady Glenconner’s late husband, Colin, transformed into a glamorous isle.
But I didn’t know much more. Was Grandpa about to be outed as a bounder who partied on the infamous island where Princess Margaret once appeared on the arm of a man wearing only a codpiece made from a coconut shell? Was Grandpa, in fact, the man wearing the codpiece? Via the lady in the bookshop, we set a date for tea at Holkham Hall, the nearby, whopping stately home in which Lady Glenconner grew up, where I presented myself nervously a few days later.
I needn’t have worried. She was a hoot and it turns out that my grandparents were perfectly behaved. All the book revealed was that, in 1965, Grandpa taught himself to fly on Mustique using a tiny plane which he took off and landed on the island’s cricket pitch, and that this came in handy whenever they needed to visit another island for supplies.
My step-grandmother Jinty would board the minuscule plane with a bottle of gin in case they crashed (she was a big fan of gin), and Colin would keep tight hold of a mask and snorkel. “I was the only passenger who didn’t have a contingency plan,” explained Lady G. My step-grandmother was also an animal lover and apparently imported “a boatload” of horses to Mustique. Was a load of horses helpful on a small tropical island, I asked over our tea. “Well, sort of,” she replied, with a chuckle.
I don’t wish to be indelicate about anyone of a certain age but I’d wondered if Lady Glenconner might be tired after all the recent excitement of publishing a smash hit. Not a bit of it. She was clearly having a ball. As a former lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret, and wife to a “difficult” man who left his estate to his manservant instead of his family, Lady G had played second fiddle to other people for most of her life and suddenly it was her time to shine.
“They want me to do book tours in Australia and New Zealand,” she said gleefully, before divulging that there was now talk of further books, including a murder mystery set on Mustique. “Do you think I should? Because there was a murder, you know.” She also mentioned that she’d left various aristocratic capers out of her book and there was “plenty” of material for a follow-up.
That follow-up, Whatever Next?, was published this week and it’s also full of eye-popping detail. Lady Glenconner’s mother used to collect “velvet”, the furry layer of skin that the Norfolk deer shed from their antlers, and they’d have it fried on toast for picnics.
Once, in the Grenadines, her husband spiked her drink with LSD and they subsequently had “extremely energetic and uninhibited sex”. Princess Margaret’s boned swimming costumes were like “wild beasts” and impossible to pack because they kept popping out of the case. And the King now sends a car when she’s invited to dinner at Sandringham because she doesn’t like driving at night. It’s a memoir but, while reading, I pondered whether it could also be shelved in the self-help section.
People are often slammed for being “privileged” these days, as if privilege is a coat of armour which protects its wearer from any arrow of hardship. Lady Glenconner has undoubtedly led a life of privilege, but crikey, she’s faced black moments, too. She was bullied very badly by a sadistic governess when young and was forced to sleep with her arms crossed above her head, tied to the bedhead.
She tackles her husband’s behaviour more forcefully in this book instead of laughing it off, writing “the simple truth is that I lived with domestic violence and abuse for most of my marriage”, before revealing that Colin once beat her so badly her right eardrum was perforated, leaving her deaf on that side. She lost two sons: one to drug addiction, another to Aids.
And yet, throughout all these traumas, she retains a joie de vivre. The word “lucky” appears 32 times across 268 pages; one never gets over the grief of losing a child, Lady Glenconner writes, but she feels lucky that she’s learned to live alongside her grief; she is very lucky to have good relationships with her daughters; lucky to have had Princess Margaret as a friend; very lucky to have a writing career now.
She turned 90 this year, but there’s a positivity in the book which many of us would do well to mull over this winter: “No one ever knows what will come next in life, and I expect I shall have all sorts of surprises, good and bad... but that idea fills me with hope and enthusiasm.”
As I realised that day over tea, she’s an extraordinarily strong woman and I feel lucky to have met her. And also quite grateful that my grandparents have got away with it again: all she lets slip in this book is that my step-grandmother “used to go to South America and come back with fabulous hand-embroidered dresses”, which she’d flog to the women on Mustique. Phew.