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

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СКАЧАТЬ and Priscilla could make out what she was saying better than anyone else, so every day Miss Knowles sent the two of them off to the kitchen, missing the last lesson of the morning, to help Miss Kempton prepare the lunch. Across the corridor was a little room, not much bigger than a cubbyhole, which permanently smelt of sour milk. It was where the maid, Sarah, poured the milk that was obligatory at break time. It came directly from the farm, a stone’s throw away, which was run by a jolly red-faced fellow called Mr Holman. He had a celebrated herd of Guernsey cows, so the milk was rich and creamy, even though most of the children hated it. The farm had not been mechanised until just before the war. All the cows had been milked by hand, and a big white carthorse called Blossom used to pull the plough. They now had a tractor, but Blossom lived on and the children loved her. They would watch her from one of the windows in the Big Schoolroom that looked out over the farmyard.

      The Big Schoolroom was Miss Knowles’ domain. There, all the children, a great mixture of ages, sat at old-fashioned wooden desks, each one with a little china ink pot, while Miss Knowles repeatedly drummed into them the finer points of English grammar, throwing pencils and books at anyone bold enough to misbehave. The room doubled up as a gym, so there were wall bars behind her desk, ropes coiled up near the ceiling and fittings for parallel bars on the walls; and it was where morning prayers were held at the start of the day. The afternoons were the best part of every day. Miss Knowles would read a story, everyone sitting in rapt attention as she read Ivanhoe, Kenilworth, Barnaby Rudge and Treasure Island – classics by Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson, all unabridged – which would be impenetrable for most of today’s eight- and nine-year-olds. She read unemotionally but accurately, bringing the books to life by richly impersonating all the characters, while narrative poems also formed part of her repertoire; Hiawatha was one of her favourites. In summer, she would sometimes read to the children in the garden. When the soft fruit was ripe, they would sit cross-legged on blankets on the lawn, topping and tailing gooseberries and blackcurrants while Miss Knowles read the story.

      Miss Knowles had a ruddy face that had never seen make-up, big blue eyes and wavy chestnut hair tied into an untidy bun at the nape of her neck. Day in day out, she was in the same clothes: a navy V-necked frock with a cream blouse underneath, and when it was cold, a navy jacket over the top. The outfit was finished off with black stockings and plain black court shoes, which made a very distinctive clacking sound in the corridors that ensured she never arrived unannounced. Josephine Ferguson, a pupil at the school in the 1940s, wrote about it in her book The Stuffed Stoat, saying Miss Knowles had once explained that an aunt had left her twenty-nine pairs of stockings and umpteen dark blue frocks and that being hard up, she had felt obliged to wear them to save money. History doesn’t relate whether she was still working her way through the same twenty-nine pairs of stockings in the 1950s, but her daily outfit was identical.

      For her pupils, though, there was no uniform. Most of the girls, Camilla included, wore dresses; and she had long white socks that miraculously always stayed up, while other people’s slid down to their ankles.

      What everyone loved best of all were nature walks, when the children roamed the countryside collecting as many different wild flowers as possible, putting them into jam-jars for Miss Knowles to identify before they were pressed and pasted into books. There was a prize at the end of the term for the child with the best collection. Sometimes the walks simply crossed the farmland at the back, sometimes they took the children further afield – walking along the road in a crocodile holding hands, two by two – to the orchid woods or the Downs.

      There was very little competition in the school – and some would say very little learning. Sports day was low-key and showing off in any way was forbidden. There was a nativity play in the Christmas term, in which Camilla and Priscilla once sang ‘We Three Kings of Orient Are’, and every year a big Christmas tree was installed in the schoolroom, decorated with real candles that were lit. Today’s health and safety inspectors would have had a fit. But the big event of the year was the summer play in which all the bigger children had a part, and which they rehearsed for weeks.

      Miss Knowles was a stickler for manners, and not just at the lunch table. She taught the children how to introduce people to one another correctly, and before the summer play everyone had to introduce their parents to those of their friends if they hadn’t yet met. It was a given that they should look people in the eye and shake hands politely, and should be just as polite to Sarah, the maid, and Cherryman, the gardener, as they were to other people’s parents.

      Miss Mary died in 1962, and twenty years later Miss Knowles retired and went to live in a cottage in a nearby village. Josephine Ferguson summed up Dumbrells in the following terms:

      unfortunately for posterity, there will never again be a school like it, and there will probably never again be such remarkable and dedicated characters as the Dumbrell sisters and Miss Knowles, who devoted their lives to teaching just a few of us, out of four generations, to have not only an erudite and resourceful outlook on life, but a compassionate manner towards our fellow beings, at the same time saving us from being priggish goody-goodies by their delightful sense of humour, which they passed on to us. They were unique women, but would never have thought themselves so.

      By the time the school closed Camilla was married and living in Wiltshire, but she often came back to Plumpton to see her parents and would occasionally go and visit her old teacher. It was an indication of just how much she’d enjoyed Dumbrells and how much she owed the school for her happy start in life. Miss Knowles had followed her progress in the meantime, as she had no doubt followed that of all her favourite pupils. When one of Camilla’s contemporaries was picking up a nephew from the school in 1973, Miss Knowles excitedly showed her a copy of the Tatler with photographs of Princess Anne’s wedding to Mark Phillips. There in the line-up was Camilla.

      7

       Swinging Sixties

      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 СКАЧАТЬ