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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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.

СКАЧАТЬ