Читать книгу The Duchess: The Untold Story – the explosive biography, as seen in the Daily Mail - Penny Junor - Страница 16

Quite a lot of little girls who are in love with ponies during their pre-teens transfer their affection when they hit puberty to boys – and their ponies are left to languish in the paddock with matted manes. Not so Camilla’s; she merely spread the love. Her ponies were replaced by bigger ponies and then horses, but she never lost her passion for them – and they were an important link between her and her father. As Annabel’s enthusiasm for horses ebbed away, it was increasingly just the two of them who shared this passion.

But there was room in her heart for boys too. She discovered the attraction of the opposite sex in her early teens. It was all perfectly innocent, but Pony Club dances in Lewes Town Hall and friends’ parties suddenly became way more exciting. When the lights dimmed and the tempo changed, everyone started dancing slowly, kissing and doing a bit of exploratory groping. Girls from good, stable families may have read about sex, thought about it, giggled about it with their friends and developed passionate crushes on boys – they may even have fallen in love with one or two of them – but even so, not many girls like Camilla lost their virginity before the age or seventeen or eighteen. And she was no exception, although she did have a first kiss at just twelve or thirteen. She was a pretty girl with a shy dimpled smile and boys found her very attractive.

By her early teens, Camilla was only at home at the weekends and in school holidays. In 1958, at the age of eleven, she had become a weekly boarder at a fashionable London school in Kensington, named after the street in which it was situated, Queen’s Gate. The difference between the two schools could not have been more extreme. At Dumbrells, the ambient noise was birdsong and farm animals. At Queen’s Gate it was the rumbling of traffic and the bustle of the capital. There were no sheep or cart horses to gaze at out of the window, no gardens to run into at break times, no orchid woods. The nearest open space was Hyde Park, a fifteen-minute walk away across busy roads and through the filth of traffic fumes. But there was a host of museums and other cultural centres on the doorstep. The Natural History Museum, the Science Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum were just a short walk away; the Royal Albert Hall and the major theatres and galleries were not much further.

Like Dumbrells, Queen’s Gate had started off in the founder’s home, in Stanhope Gardens, in 1891, but a year later the school moved round the corner into a leased building at 132 Queen’s Gate. Its founder was Miss Eleanor Beatrice Wyatt, but she was principal for no more than eight years. The woman who took the school into the twentieth century was Miss Annabel Douglas, an American who had come to the UK as a student. She took the lease of the house next door, no. 133, doubling the capacity, and her own replacement in 1919, Miss Spalding, enlarged it still further by buying no. 131.

Two more houses have been added since then for the junior school but to this day, the school still has its premises in this elegant Victorian terrace, in one of the most sought-after residential areas of London. It is a warren of staircases, mostly small rooms and narrow passageways on five floors. On the face of it, the site is utterly impractical for a school that today has more than 500 pupils, with no playing fields on site and no parking – although who needs playing fields with all those staircases? Yet it has been successfully educating privileged young ladies for 125 years and everyone seems very happy there.

Nowadays, Queen’s Gate is as academic as the next school, and in February 2016, the Duchess made a return visit to officially open an impressive new science laboratory in the basement. But in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when she was there as a pupil, there was no real expectation that any girl would go on to university after school or have a career. There were no high-tech science labs – like most public girls’ schools at that time, there were wooden benches with bunsen burners, and maybe a diagram of the alimentary canal and a frog or two to be dissected in the biology lab. Girls in all but a few fee-paying schools were very disadvantaged compared to their sisters in state grammar schools. In the private system girls were being prepared for marriage and motherhood – a smattering of European languages, a readiness to do good deeds in the community and an ability to cook and sew were deemed more important than academic qualifications. Girls’ education has undergone a revolution in the intervening years, and Camilla just missed it.

Girls who worked hard in those days, moreover, the swots, were definitely not cool. The cool kids mucked about, smoked, drank and bunked off lessons, and they were the ones that had the friends. Camilla was never short of friends and she couldn’t have been less interested in the idea of a career. She wasn’t itching to travel or see the world and had no desire to go to university. She wasn’t ambitious, and she wasn’t influenced by her more aspiring contemporaries. She wanted the life her mother and so many of her mother’s county friends had. She wanted no more from life than to be happily married to an upper-class man and live a sociable life in the country with horses, dogs, children and someone to look after them all and do the hard graft.

‘I cannot believe that Queen’s Gate has been going for 125 years,’ she said after she’d unveiled a plaque marking her visit in 2016. ‘I feel like it’s 125 years since I was here. I wish I could say I was a head girl, or even a prefect or captain of games – I was none of those, I might have been in the swimming team. But I do remember I was a boarder here, which I hear now is abolished. I was a weekly boarder and lived right at the top of the school, quite cold, I think we were always made to have the windows open – fresh air.

‘I did leave when I was sixteen, I didn’t go on to the sixth form. I think in those days we weren’t encouraged to go to university. I think the very, very clever girls went on but nobody seemed to give us much inspiration to go on. So we went off and explored the university of life, and Paris and Florence and London.’

She only boarded for the first couple of years. In 1960, Rosalind bought a flat round the corner in Queen’s Gate Gardens so Camilla could become a day girl while she and Annabel, who followed her to Queen’s Gate, had somewhere to live. To look after the girls, and effectively to chaperone them, she installed an unmarried friend called Cecilia Hay, an interior decorator – and who was nearly sent to an early grave by the experience.

Camilla would often travel up on the train from Lewes at the end of the weekend with Lord Shawcross, who as Sir Hartley Shawcross, KC had made his name as the brilliant chief British prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal in 1945–6. He and his wife, Joan, and their children, William (who at that time was very smitten with Camilla), Joanna and Hume, all of a similar age to the Shand children, were close family friends who lived on the other side of Lewes. Joan was herself mad about horses and hunted with Bruce, and the families were regularly in and out of each other’s houses. By the end of the 1950s, among Hartley’s roles was a directorship of Shell Petroleum, and Joan was invited by the company to launch a new tanker called Aluco that had been built in Newcastle. They turned it into a two-family outing, and so grown-ups and children all piled into a Pullman train for a very luxurious journey north, where they stayed in an equally luxurious hotel – one which the love-struck William remembers well.

Camilla left Queen’s Gate in 1964 having learnt how to fence, but with just one O level, which given her ability was surprising. Miss Knowles must have wondered what on earth had gone wrong. There were perhaps advantages to having nothing more distracting than Blossom and a herd of Guernseys outside the schoolroom door.

She went home to the country for the summer holidays and, along with Priscilla, took a short cookery course with a former teacher from Constance Spry’s domestic science academy who taught from her own house near Lewes. Then, after their birthdays in July – there was just ten days between them – they learnt to drive with the local driving instructor, ‘a dreadful old man’ who developed piles and had to give up. But not before he had got them both through their tests – which were taken in Brighton – on the second attempt. There followed long lazy days with friends, gossiping by the swimming pool at The Laines, where the roses were all in bloom. Kirsty Aitken, granddaughter of the newspaper baron Lord Beaverbrook, was another schoolmate and close friend. Camilla was never short of friends – or boyfriends. That part of East Sussex had an unusually lively social circle, particularly in the horsey world. A lot of the girls she knew had older brothers, and even if they weren’t especially horsey a lot of them had been members of the pony club as children, and had been to all the pony club dances. Camilla attracted them like bees to a honeypot and always had several gangly teenagers pining for her.

The elegant seaside town of Brighton, with its Regency terraces, wide pebble beach and amusement piers, was the local hotspot. They used to go there to the cinema and the theatre, or to hang out in the coffee bars and pubs and buy new releases from the record shops. Camilla was never really into the Beatles but loved the Rolling Stones. Brighton had once, when the railway was built linking it to London in Victorian times, been a very fashionable resort and it was still a lovely town – and since Sussex University had opened there in 1962, it had become younger, more vibrant and edgier. Before anyone could drive, a parent would take them, but when Camilla acquired an admirer a few years older than her, Richard Burgoyne, who owned a snazzy sports car, he drove them. The Shands didn’t drive showy cars. Bruce had a little white van with no seats in the back; the children would all pile in, sitting on the metal floor and sliding around. No regulations about seats or seatbelts in those days.

At the end of the summer Camilla was sent off to finishing school in Switzerland, to a place called Mon Fertile on the banks of Lake Geneva – just one of many such schools at that time. It was the standard next step for well-heeled teenagers who were neither destined to go down the academic path nor yet old enough to be launched into the marriage market. Parents who might have been anxious about letting their daughters go abroad on their own at such a young age were reassured by the solid stability of the Swiss and the multilingual culture around Lake Geneva. So for nine months, they were packed off to learn to ski, to perfect their French, and to learn the finer points of etiquette while having fun in a picturesque environment.

Such places have mostly long gone but at that time, they were seen as a crucial step in completing a girl’s education. Girls learnt flower arranging, how to cook and sew, dress the table for a formal dinner party and taste wine, as well as basic first aid, child care and domestic accounting. Deportment was also an important part of the curriculum. From Switzerland Camilla went to Paris, to the Institut Britannique, and came away after six months having had a lot of fun but with a lifelong terror of lifts. She was stuck in one, she told me, for seven hours with a friend and two Frenchmen. Her team knows better than to try and put her in one. She will walk up any number of stairs rather than be incarcerated in a lift ever again.

But learning to speak idiomatic French was useful. She made a short speech in the language on her first solo foreign trip, to Paris in May 2013, in her capacity as patron of Emmaus UK, a charity founded in the French capital after the Second World War to help homeless people rebuild their lives. She travelled from London on the Eurostar train, to the surprise of fellow passengers, and joked that it was her first official trip without her husband and may be her last. She took some Emmaus companions, formerly homeless themselves, and in typical style told them how she was dreading the speech. ‘If it all goes wrong then I will need you to clap loudly and disguise it,’ she said. ‘I’ll give you all signs to hold up too.’

The signs were not needed. ‘I hope you will forgive my rusty French,’ she said to a crowded room, ‘but it is fifty years since I was a student at the Institut Britannique in Paris.’ Speaking slowly at first, she appeared to grow in confidence as she got into it. The verdict was that her pronunciation was very English but her French was faultless.

Camilla never embraced the Swinging Sixties wholeheartedly, as her sister, her brother and most of her contemporaries did, but when she returned to London fully ‘finished’ in 1965, there was no more exciting place to be. The austerity of the post-war years was finally over, the baby boomers had come of age, they had disposable income, they had ideals and they were wanting a different world from their parents. They were seizing the day and having fun. They marched for CND to ban the bomb; they made love not war; they had student sit-ins and demonstrations; they made their own psychedelic music – the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys, the Animals, the Hollies, The Who; they bought Oz, Richard Neville’s countercultural creation, and Private Eye, started by Richard Ingrams and friends, two magazines that offended and challenged the Establishment; and they questioned all the conventions that had been drilled into them in their youth.

The men grew out their short back and sides and partings, while men and women alike threw out the conservative clothes their parents wore and dressed themselves in pretty, colourful fabrics, beads, bell-bottoms, culottes, wide belts that were purely decorative, thigh-length boots, floppy hats and shaggy Afghan sheepskin coats. It was Mary Quant who had started the fashion revolution – she became the first person to design specifically for the young and we flocked to Bazaar, her iconic shop in the King’s Road, for miniskirts – but others like Ossie Clark, Alice Pollock, Celia Birtwell and Barbara Hulanicki quickly followed, and suddenly fashion was affordable and fun. At the same time Jean Shrimpton, Celia Hammond, Pattie Boyd and Twiggy – a new breed of model – were showing us how to wear it, how to wear make-up and style our hair. We didn’t sit in rollers under great dome dryers as our mothers did; we had our hair cut and blown dry by a new breed of stylist – Leonard of Mayfair, Daniel Galvin and Vidal Sassoon.

London was buzzing. Boutiques and markets sprang up all over but most of the action was in the King’s Road in Chelsea and Carnaby Street in Soho. Clubs and coffee shops also opened, places for young people to hang out and meet their friends and listen to up-and-coming musicians and pop groups. Some of Camilla’s favourite haunts with her friends were the Stock Pot in the King’s Road – where you could eat for peanuts – the Builders Arms in Cale Street and a nightclub in a basement at the bottom of Park Lane.

Camilla was right there in the midst of it all, but remarkably untouched by it. She was never a hippy, but she was no goody-goody; she and her friends had a wild time. She smoked like a chimney, drank her fair share, and loved to party. Priscilla remembers being thrown off a bus by the conductor because she was wearing such a short miniskirt that her knickers were visible. ‘The clippy said it was “disgusting”. It was before the age of tights and I had on stockings and suspenders. It’s now the most embarrassing thing in my life, but that was the era, and of course we didn’t mind a bit, we couldn’t have cared less. We all went to parties and we all behaved badly all the time. The Sixties music was more fun than anything.’

But Camilla was never into flower power or drugs, and her style of dressing remained surprisingly conservative, given the cornucopia of variety that was out there. Bohemian she was not. The year when the real partying began was the year she came out, and the year she met her cavalry officer, who was eight years older than her and never the sort of man who would have been influenced by the counterculture. Thereafter, she was locked into a very conservative world; and she felt comfortable there. She found herself a couple of temporary jobs, one of them more temporary than she intended. She joined Colefax and Fowler, the exclusive interior design company, as one of several well-bred assistants, and didn’t last the week. When she turned up late for work one day her boss, Tom Parr, a difficult man prone to explosions of rage, sacked her on the spot. Imogen Taylor, now in her nineties, who had considerably more sticking power – she was head designer for fifty years – wrote in her memoirs, On the Fringe, ‘There were a lot of debutantes working for us, including Camilla. She worked for us for a moment, but then got the sack.’ She wasn’t alone. ‘He would shout and bellow so the building heard every word. He’d roar: “Get out, you silly b***h. Go – leave at once! I can’t have people like you in the firm!” when some poor girl had merely folded something the wrong way or done something very minor. The Duchess of Cornwall was one assistant who fell victim to his tantrums – she came in late having been to a dance.’

Camilla couldn’t have cared less. But what made everyone at Colefax and Fowler laugh was that she was living at Claridges, hardly a minute’s walk away. Her grandmother, Sonia, a very wealthy woman, permanently kept a suite in the luxurious hotel and Camilla had been drying her hair in the window and fallen asleep.

By then, her grandfather was dead and the family fortune had gone to Henry Cubitt, Camilla’s uncle and godfather, known as ‘Mad Harry’, the 4th Baron Ashcombe. He also inherited Denbies. When Rolie died in 1962, the Cubitts were the largest landowners in London after the Westminsters and Cadogans. They owned the whole of Pimlico; there were also vast estates in the South of France and Canada, but Harry was an alcoholic and virtually lost the lot. He moved in glitzier circles than his sister and in the good times had a house in Barbados, where Camilla went for some sunshine in the winter of 1971, taking her friend Virginia Carington with her. Harry was forty-seven and divorced; Virginia was twenty-five and fell for his charms. To everyone’s surprise, they married in 1973, but were divorced in 1979. Virginia now works at Clarence House running Charles and Camilla’s private diaries.

Harry finally got on top of his addiction and was married a third time to another, much younger, woman, Elizabeth Dent-Brocklehurst, the Kentucky-born widow of his friend Mark. Mark Dent-Brocklehurst had died seven years earlier at the age of forty, leaving her two small children, Henry and Mollie; Sudeley Castle, a large 1,000-year-old property in Gloucestershire; and hefty death duties to be paid. Harry, who had never had any children himself, sold his own house, moved into Sudeley and spent the rest of his life helping to restore the castle, where Henry VIII’s widow Katherine Parr died, and turn it into a tourist attraction while working with addiction charities. He died in 2013.