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

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СКАЧАТЬ house with merriment, boosted rather than criticised them and made them feel valued, safe and loved. They encouraged them to be their own people, to seize life with both hands. To believe that the world was a good place with good people in it, that life was to be enjoyed – and that there would always be a welcome at home, no matter what. They were a tight-knit bunch who had each other’s backs covered and who respected one another.

      Until her teens, Camilla’s life was about ponies. She rode them, she drew pictures of them, she read books about them and her bedroom was full of rosettes she had won at the local gymkhanas. Her favourite pony was a piebald called Bambino, who lived in a field at the bottom of the garden that they rented from the next-door farm. She loved it to bits and looked after it meticulously. Annabel rode but was never as keen as Camilla, while their mother didn’t ride, although her own father had been a master of foxhounds so she’d grown up around horses. Mark had no interest – he preferred elephants.

      Camilla rode on the Downs, the range of rolling chalk hills that extend for about 260 square miles from the Itchen Valley in Hampshire to the white cliffs of Beachy Head, near Eastbourne. And covering the entire area is a network of public footpaths and bridleways. The main bridleway, the South Downs Way, is 100 miles long, but there are over 2,000 miles of other tracks. For a little girl in love with ponies, it could not have been more idyllic, and a childhood roaming free in such an expanse explains why Camilla is at her very happiest in the countryside.

      Her great childhood friend, Priscilla Spencer, was also pony mad. Almost exactly the same age, Priscilla moved into a house across the fields when they were both eight, and went to the same school. For a while, she and her younger sister Judy, Camilla and Annabel all had riding lessons together with a fierce, ex-military man called Mr Stuckle. He took them up onto the Downs and bellowed at them until Annabel refused point blank to go again. After that they went riding by themselves, day after day. Often they’d be gone all day, riding for miles, flying over the wooden jumps known as tiger traps and dodging defence installations left over from the war. They took sandwiches in little leather boxes attached to their saddles. And sometimes, they would sleep overnight on the Downs, out in the open. This was long before mobile phones. Everyone wanted a mother who was as easy-going and relaxed as Rosalind.

      The children never had nannies. Rosalind was a full-time, hands-on mother. Sometimes David in the cottage might ferry them to school but it was usually Rosalind, and she’d be there for the plays and concerts, the fetes, the fairs. On summer afternoons after school, she would take them down to the beach at Hove for a swim in the sea – something Camilla loves to this day. But most of the time she just let them do their own thing. She was strict about manners and hot on discipline – she would get furious with Mark for trashing her lawn with his go-cart – but she gave them the freedom to fly and in their different ways, they did. Bruce was never the disciplinarian in the family, and her mother would have said he let Camilla get away with murder.

      Their friends loved coming to stay at The Laines, and it was as much to see Rosalind and Bruce as it was to be with them. As Priscilla says, ‘Sometimes you come across somebody who really is exceptional and Rosalind was that person. She was very like Camilla. A bit sharper of tongue but funny – the most amusing person you’d ever, ever meet. I absolutely adored her. And Bruce was the best looking man you’ve ever looked at in your life, urbane and charming.’

      One very special feature of The Laines was the garden. It was Rosalind’s domain and her passion. With the help of well-known landscape gardener Lanning Roper, she created formal lawns, made rose gardens, planted hedging, shrubs, flowers and specimen trees, all of which are now fully mature. Outside the kitchen she put in a fig which she and Bruce brought back from the Garden of Gethsemane, in Jerusalem, and at the bottom of the garden she planted an oak sapling that they bought on the 900th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings. It was said to have come from the very oak tree in which King Harold’s mistress, Edith the Fair, sat to watch the battle in which he was slain. And in the walled garden she grew vegetables, and espaliered fruit trees along the walls.

      Camilla did eventually inherit her mother’s love of gardening but growing up, if she wasn’t doing something horsey, she would be lounging around the swimming pool with her friends. Or she would be at school.

      6

       The Stuffed Stoat

      At the age of five, Camilla went to Dumbrells, a little village school in Ditchling, about three miles from her home. The pupils – the school was attended by both girls and boys – were housed in three classrooms and there was a dairy farm next door. The children either loved it or loathed it, sank or swam – and the difference was almost entirely down to whether the headmistress, a terrifying figure called Miss Knowles, rated them or not. She liked quick-witted children and if their intelligence wasn’t immediately evident, she had no interest in finding the key to unlock their potential. The result was swingeing favouritism. To her favourites she was the most extraordinary, exciting and inspirational teacher, who gave the lucky ones a passable education, a zest for the outdoors and a moral code for life. Camilla was one of those lucky ones, and her six years at Dumbrells were some of the happiest of her life.

      The school was named after the three sisters who founded it 1882, the three Misses Dumbrell – May, Edith and Mary. Having fallen on hard times, with their widowed mother, they brought in a tenant farmer to run their farm and turned their home into North End House Home School, a boarding establishment for young children whose parents were in India. By the time Camilla arrived in 1952, the name had changed, there were no boarders, two ugly prefab wooden classrooms had been added, and the only Miss Dumbrell left was the very elderly Miss Mary, a tiny figure dressed in a long grey gown and mittens, out of which her tiny fingers peeped. Miss Knowles was in her fifties; she had been a pupil at the school, returned as an assistant teacher in 1924 and was there until it closed down in 1982. It is now a private house again. The front drive has been rerouted and an estate of sheltered housing has encroached on much of the garden that the children used to play in, but many original features remain – though not, alas, the alarming stuffed stoat in a glass case that used to greet the children as they came through the front door each morning. It appeared to be gazing in terror at a stuffed bat on the other wall.

      French was taught from an early age, and at lunchtime one of the three long tables in the dining room – to which the children were summoned by a loud gong – was a ‘French’ table. Everyone who sat at it was expected to speak French to the teachers who presided. Translating spotted dick and jam roly-poly, two favourites, into French was quite a challenge, and during Camilla’s time the convention was abandoned. Lunch began and ended with the saying of grace. There was always a choice of two main courses with vegetables and two puddings – one a milk pudding, the other baked – but it was Hobson’s choice. To make sure there was enough of everything to go round, each child had to have something different from his or her neighbour, so if you hated rissoles or tapioca the clever thing was to sit next to someone who loved them. The food was generally delicious, and all freshly cooked – most of the vegetables came from the garden. No one was allowed to start until they had all had been served, nor finish until the teachers had finished. And anyone who didn’t finish their food had it taken into the Big Schoolroom, where they had to eat it later in front of everyone under the eagle eye of Miss Knowles. Everyone had to use a knife and fork and hold them properly with their first finger on the shaft – not like a pen. There was no speaking or drinking water with one’s mouth full, and no shouting. And neighbours had to look after each other and pass them what they needed. At the end, everyone stood while grace was said again.

      Miss Kempton, the cook, was an eccentric woman with a harelip. The children were scared of her and because of the lip, found СКАЧАТЬ