The Duchess: The Untold Story – the explosive biography, as seen in the Daily Mail. Penny Junor

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СКАЧАТЬ depended, of course, on which was the more buttery. The excitement was intense while the contest was on. Sometimes he won, sometimes I did. Although the owner of a Derby winner, Kingy’s enthusiasm seemed delightfully unaffected by the quality of his bets.

      George Keppel’s name was on the birth certificates of both Alice’s daughters but there was speculation that their biological fathers were more likely to have been other men. Violet, born in 1894, was rumoured to have been the child of MP William Becket, while Sonia, born in 1900, was said to resemble George Keppel but was more probably Bertie’s. Either way, Sonia loved the man she believed to be her father and wrote very warmly about him, but as a child she accepted that sometimes holidays didn’t include him. At Easter, she and Violet, plus the ubiquitous Nannie, travelled through France by wagon-lit to spend two or three weeks in Biarritz with Kingy, as guests of Sir Ernest Cassel at the Villa Eugenie. Sonia repeatedly confused Sir Ernest with the King and would dutifully bob to him: ‘gradually I came to realise that Tweedledum was quite easily distinguishable from august Tweedledee. For one thing, Tweedledee laughed more easily and, as I already knew, he could enter into nursery games with unassumed enthusiasm. Always he was accompanied by his dog, Caesar, who had a fine disregard for the villa’s curtains and chair-legs, but a close personal regard for me.’

      Easter Sunday at Biarritz was an occasion for giving beautiful presents, and not just to the grown-ups. Throughout her life, Sonia had a collection of little Easter eggs given to her by Kingy and Sir Ernest. One was ‘exquisitely midget’ in royal blue enamel, embossed with a diamond ‘E’ and topped by a tiny crown in gold and rubies.

      After present giving, they would set off for a mammoth picnic:

      Kingy liked to think of these as impromptu parties, and little did he realise the hours of preliminary hard work they had entailed. First his car led the way, followed by others containing the rest of the party. Then the food, guarded by at least two footmen, brought up the rear. Kingy spied out the land for a suitable site and, at his given word, we all stopped, and the footmen set out the lunch. Chairs and a table appeared, linen table-cloths, plates, glasses, silver. Every variety of cold food was produced, spiced by iced cup in silver-plated containers. Everything was on a high level of excellence, except the site chosen. For some unfathomed reason, Kingy had a preference for picnicking by the side of the road.

      Violet, six years older than Sonia, grew up to a notoriety of her own after she fell in love with Vita Sackville-West. They had met as children with a mutual enthusiasm for books and horses, and at fourteen, when they went with their governesses to Florence together to learn Italian, Violet had declared her love to Vita and given her a special ring. Not many years later they became lovers.

      Although homosexuality between women was never illegal it was still scandalous; but, like adultery, it was less so if conducted within the respectability of marriage. Both women went on to marry but they continued to be lovers, frequently going abroad together for months at a time. In 1913, Vita married Harold Nicolson, the diplomat, diarist, author and politician, with whom she had two children and a devoted but open relationship – he had homosexual lovers of his own. Violet married in 1919, but she did so under pressure from her mother, who was worried about the scandal affecting Sonia’s chances of a good marriage. The marked man was Denys Trefusis, the soldier son of an aristocrat, a cavalry officer with The Blues who’d fought heroically in the First World War and was left with what today would be called post-traumatic stress disorder. Sonia didn’t much like him to begin with and thought Violet had made an odd choice – he was neither literary nor artistic, which were the sort of people her sister liked to be around, but she warmed to him ‘when I discovered that he had a sense of the ridiculous very much like mine’. But Violet never did – and the lack of feeling was mutual. Alice threatened to stop Violet’s allowance unless she married Denys and she bankrolled him for some time, repeatedly refusing to let the pair file for an annulment. When Violet finally accepted that her affair with Vita was over, she and Denys moved to France, but they became completely estranged. She had a lengthy affair there with the Princess de Polignac, formerly Winaretta Singer, a daughter of the American sewing machine millionaire Isaac Singer. Her husband, Prince Edmond de Polignac, was a discreet homosexual.

      Sonia Keppel’s marriage was infinitely happier than her sister’s – although it did end in divorce. She met Roland Cubitt in 1918. ‘Rolie’s greatest charm,’ she wrote, ‘was his gaiety. With his bright eyes and inexhaustible capacity for enjoyment, he looked like an alert fox terrier, eager for exercise … I began to invest Rolie himself with practically every romantic quality: Adonis’s beauty; the chivalry of Sir Lancelot; the fidelity of Leander; the heroism of King Arthur. Being an essentially simple person, had he realised this he would have been extremely embarrassed by it … In his happy way he took people as he found them and he expected them to do the same about him.’

      They were unofficially engaged for a year before she was invited to spend a weekend at Denbies, the family seat, to meet his parents. She was terrified and had been warned in advance that Lord Ashcombe led family prayers every morning, Lady Ashcombe didn’t like fashionable girls, she liked them to look natural and to wear gloves at all times, and no one was allowed to smoke in the drawing room or to play cards on Sundays. She lowered the hem of her dress specially in preparation for the visit and used only minimal face powder.

      Throughout tea, on the afternoon of their arrival, Lady Ashcombe referred to Sonia in the third person singular. ‘“Will the young lady have sugar in her tea? Will the young lady have a scone and some home-made strawberry jam?” Half dead with fright, I had a feeling that, by these indirect references, she was inferring that I had been deprived of my passport.’ It wasn’t until Monday morning that she detected anything approaching a thaw. ‘Still terribly nervous, somehow or other my restless hands got hold of a piece of knotted string which, unconsciously, I began to unravel. As she watched me, with sudden warmth in her voice, Lady Ashcombe commented: “I like young ladies who undo string!” Dared I hope by that remark that she had decided to return me my passport?’

      His parents insisted the couple were too young to marry, but in reality were not keen on their son, and now heir, marrying the daughter of the King’s mistress. Alice expressed concerns too, but not about their age. ‘It isn’t that I don’t like Rolie,’ she had said, ‘I think he’s very nice. But if you marry him, you’ll marry into a world you’ve never known, and I’m not at all sure that you’ll like it.’

      In comparison to the exotic and exciting world Sonia had known for the first twenty years of her life, the Ashcombes’ world was certainly very conservative and oppressive. Sonia had always been chaperoned but she had been allowed a great deal of freedom, and she was a brave, fashionable and feisty young woman. When a general, a big broad man, who had promised her mother he would act as her chaperon, made a sudden lunge for her in the back of a brougham between the Ritz Hotel and the Albert Hall, heading for the first big event of the 1919 London Season, she scratched his face. ‘“What a little tigress it is!” he exclaimed delightedly. “Quite able to fend for itself really, without a chaperon!”’ With silent intensity she fought him all the way, and by the time they arrived at the ball, her dress was torn, the powder gone from her nose and her shoulder had a big bruise. The general, on the other hand, had a face criss-crossed with red scratches and a swollen left thumb that clearly bore teeth-marks where she had bitten him. ‘As the brougham drove up to the entrance, he looked at me and burst out laughing. “Never enjoyed a drive so much in my life!” he exclaimed. “Now, run along, and tidy up, before I hand you over.”’

      And when her parents took her off for a three-week winter sports holiday in Switzerland, to the Palace Hotel in St Moritz, home to the famous Cresta Run, she had not been there for twenty-four hours before she’d taken up bobsleighing and agreed to take part in the Bobsleigh Derby, the big event of the bobsleighing calendar. She joined two teams of complete strangers; in one she was with a crew of four men, in the other with two men, and she was to do the steering. They had bumped into some old friends in the hotel, the Duke of Alba and the Duke СКАЧАТЬ