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

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      Bruce and Rosalind were a golden couple who seemed to have everything: good looks, charm, class, money, healthy children and a happy marriage, one that did last an eternity. Bruce was a genial, cultured man who loved art and music as well as his horses. He was courteous, immaculately dressed, scrupulously polite, always smiling; a man to whom people immediately warmed. So was Rosalind. She was big-bosomed, big-hearted, generous and tactile. She too dressed smartly in skirts and suits, with bright red lipstick, but she was less conventional than she looked. She invariably had a small cigar in one hand, and liked her children’s friends to call her by her first name, which was unusual in the 1950s. She was a strong woman from a long line of strong women.

      Rosalind could be sharp – she didn’t appreciate being called Ros – but she was very funny and famed for her throwaway lines. When a teenage Camilla and her friend, Priscilla, were dressed up to the nines, ready to hit the town of Brighton for the evening, she said, ‘My God, Camilla, you look just like Mandy Rice-Davies with spots!’ For all that, she was hugely caring. Every Wednesday for seventeen years she went to Chailey Heritage, a school for the disabled outside Lewes, where she worked as a volunteer with thalidomide children. She only stopped when the pain of her osteoporosis made it impossible to make the journey.

      The house in East Sussex where they settled after Camilla’s birth, a seven-bedroom former rectory, called The Laines – initially they rented it – is not classically beautiful. But its position, nestling at the foot of the South Downs with not another building in sight, is hard to beat, and the garden that Rosalind created, like a series of rooms, is still beautiful. The main section was built in the eighteenth century in the local style of flint and red brick, with later additions; the ivy-clad house sits on a slight incline at the end of a gravel driveway, in complete seclusion, surrounded by five acres of garden, with fields belonging to the neighbouring farm beyond. It’s big but not grand, essentially a comfortable family home, with light, airy rooms, high ceilings and open fireplaces where log fires crackled in winter. Like all old houses with rattling windows – royal ones included – it could be very cold.

      The kitchen did not play a part in family life, as it might do today. Tucked away in the servants’ wing behind a green baize door, it was small and dingy, as kitchens so often were at that time, even in the smartest houses, and was the domain of the cook. Rosalind didn’t cook. She preferred the growing and eating of food and left the cooking to Maria, the female half of a devoted Italian couple who were with the family for many years. Her husband waited at table. Another couple lived in a cottage at the end of the drive: David was an oddjob man-cum-gardener and chauffeur, and Christine was the cleaner and housekeeper.

      It was a house for living in, for wonderful meals with friends, for children and dogs, not a status symbol – but it was filled with beautiful things, particularly paintings. Rosalind had a good eye and was a great homemaker, as her daughters are. She used warm, earthy colours and pretty fabrics. The furniture was a mix of old and new, of comfortable modern sofas and chairs and antique chests, desks, tables and mirrors; there were plenty of objets d’art scattered about, bits of silver, table lamps and framed photographs. Many of the better pieces were heirlooms, mostly from Rosalind’s side of the family. The dogs were Sealyham terriers.

      Although they didn’t use the kitchen, food and drink played an important part in the family’s lives. They gathered round the dining-room table for noisy meals, with their framed ancestors looking down at them from the walls, and ate simple but delicious fare with vegetables fresh from the garden. It was the scene of many a lively dinner party too. Guests would afterwards repair to the drawing room, an elegant formal room, but when it was just the family they used a smaller sitting room, to which in the 1970s they added an orangery that Rosalind filled with plants. Or there was the library, with a club fender around the fireplace. Books were everywhere; Bruce’s study, where he sat for many hours reading and working, was lined with them.

      Camilla’s bedroom was always a mess. It was above the drawing room, with a bathroom next door that she shared with Annabel, whose room was beyond. There were four bathrooms but none of them were en suite – few were in those days – although each bedroom had a washbasin. The house was often full. Friends and family came from all over to stay or spend weekends. They would come to attend events at Glyndebourne, the great opera house that was just a fifteen-minute drive away – the Christie family who ran it were good friends – or there was the Theatre Royal in Brighton, where shows were trialled before moving into the West End of London, and there was horse racing at Plumpton just along the road. Hunting friends would come for a day out with the Southdown and in the summer, the beach was no more than half an hour away.

      Bruce and Rosalind were a sociable pair at a time when people living in the countryside enjoyed an active social round, before the breathalyser put an end to drink-driving, and while domestic staff were still present to make entertaining easy. It was a time when people dressed up for the theatre and changed into evening wear for dinner, when the ladies withdrew afterwards to powder their noses, leaving the men to talk, smoke cigars and pass the port. But although they lived in one of the biggest houses around, they were refreshingly modest – even after Bruce was appointed Deputy and then Vice Lord Lieutenant of East Sussex in the early 1970s. He also became an officer in the Queen’s Bodyguard (the Yeomen of the Guard), whose headquarters are at St James’s Palace. This elite group is the oldest British military corps still in existence, and has all sorts of arcane titles. Bruce was invited to join it in middle age, and when he retired at the age of seventy he had reached the rank of Clerk of the Cheque and Adjutant. It was a career, he joked, that involved dressing as if to fight the Battle of Waterloo – and one that Rosalind hadn’t been able to take too seriously. ‘Oh God, Bruce, do you have to?’ was her reaction. She may have been upper class to her bootstraps, but you would never have known it from her conversation or her lifestyle – and class was a word she abhorred. She never actually voted Labour, but she certainly flirted with the idea; she was a thoroughly egalitarian woman who took everybody at face value no matter what their background. There was never a hint of snobbishness or entitlement from any of them. Every year they opened their garden to the public, they held fundraising events and parties for the hunt and the pony club. All the children’s friends came to swim in the pool. Everyone was welcomed with the same warmth, and when Bruce left the village after Rosalind’s death, having lived there for forty-five years, locals had nothing but good words to say about them.

      Camilla, Annabel and Mark could not have had more perfect childhoods, СКАЧАТЬ