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

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СКАЧАТЬ they were seen as a crucial step in completing a girl’s education. Girls learnt flower arranging, how to cook and sew, dress the table for a formal dinner party and taste wine, as well as basic first aid, child care and domestic accounting. Deportment was also an important part of the curriculum. From Switzerland Camilla went to Paris, to the Institut Britannique, and came away after six months having had a lot of fun but with a lifelong terror of lifts. She was stuck in one, she told me, for seven hours with a friend and two Frenchmen. Her team knows better than to try and put her in one. She will walk up any number of stairs rather than be incarcerated in a lift ever again.

      But learning to speak idiomatic French was useful. She made a short speech in the language on her first solo foreign trip, to Paris in May 2013, in her capacity as patron of Emmaus UK, a charity founded in the French capital after the Second World War to help homeless people rebuild their lives. She travelled from London on the Eurostar train, to the surprise of fellow passengers, and joked that it was her first official trip without her husband and may be her last. She took some Emmaus companions, formerly homeless themselves, and in typical style told them how she was dreading the speech. ‘If it all goes wrong then I will need you to clap loudly and disguise it,’ she said. ‘I’ll give you all signs to hold up too.’

      The signs were not needed. ‘I hope you will forgive my rusty French,’ she said to a crowded room, ‘but it is fifty years since I was a student at the Institut Britannique in Paris.’ Speaking slowly at first, she appeared to grow in confidence as she got into it. The verdict was that her pronunciation was very English but her French was faultless.

      Camilla never embraced the Swinging Sixties wholeheartedly, as her sister, her brother and most of her contemporaries did, but when she returned to London fully ‘finished’ in 1965, there was no more exciting place to be. The austerity of the post-war years was finally over, the baby boomers had come of age, they had disposable income, they had ideals and they were wanting a different world from their parents. They were seizing the day and having fun. They marched for CND to ban the bomb; they made love not war; they had student sit-ins and demonstrations; they made their own psychedelic music – the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys, the Animals, the Hollies, The Who; they bought Oz, Richard Neville’s countercultural creation, and Private Eye, started by Richard Ingrams and friends, two magazines that offended and challenged the Establishment; and they questioned all the conventions that had been drilled into them in their youth.

      The men grew out their short back and sides and partings, while men and women alike threw out the conservative clothes their parents wore and dressed themselves in pretty, colourful fabrics, beads, bell-bottoms, culottes, wide belts that were purely decorative, thigh-length boots, floppy hats and shaggy Afghan sheepskin coats. It was Mary Quant who had started the fashion revolution – she became the first person to design specifically for the young and we flocked to Bazaar, her iconic shop in the King’s Road, for miniskirts – but others like Ossie Clark, Alice Pollock, Celia Birtwell and Barbara Hulanicki quickly followed, and suddenly fashion was affordable and fun. At the same time Jean Shrimpton, Celia Hammond, Pattie Boyd and Twiggy – a new breed of model – were showing us how to wear it, how to wear make-up and style our hair. We didn’t sit in rollers under great dome dryers as our mothers did; we had our hair cut and blown dry by a new breed of stylist – Leonard of Mayfair, Daniel Galvin and Vidal Sassoon.

      London was buzzing. Boutiques and markets sprang up all over but most of the action was in the King’s Road in Chelsea and Carnaby Street in Soho. Clubs and coffee shops also opened, places for young people to hang out and meet their friends and listen to up-and-coming musicians and pop groups. Some of Camilla’s favourite haunts with her friends were the Stock Pot in the King’s Road – where you could eat for peanuts – the Builders Arms in Cale Street and a nightclub in a basement at the bottom of Park Lane.

      Camilla was right there in the midst of it all, but remarkably untouched by it. She was never a hippy, but she was no goody-goody; she and her friends had a wild time. She smoked like a chimney, drank her fair share, and loved to party. Priscilla remembers being thrown off a bus by the conductor because she was wearing such a short miniskirt that her knickers were visible. ‘The clippy said it was “disgusting”. It was before the age of tights and I had on stockings and suspenders. It’s now the most embarrassing thing in my life, but that was the era, and of course we didn’t mind a bit, we couldn’t have cared less. We all went to parties and we all behaved badly all the time. The Sixties music was more fun than anything.’

      But Camilla was never into flower power or drugs, and her style of dressing remained surprisingly conservative, given the cornucopia of variety that was out there. Bohemian she was not. The year when the real partying began was the year she came out, and the year she met her cavalry officer, who was eight years older than her and never the sort of man who would have been influenced by the counterculture. Thereafter, she was locked into a very conservative world; and she felt comfortable there. She found herself a couple of temporary jobs, one of them more temporary than she intended. She joined Colefax and Fowler, the exclusive interior design company, as one of several well-bred assistants, and didn’t last the week. When she turned up late for work one day her boss, Tom Parr, a difficult man prone to explosions of rage, sacked her on the spot. Imogen Taylor, now in her nineties, who had considerably more sticking power – she was head designer for fifty years – wrote in her memoirs, On the Fringe, ‘There were a lot of debutantes working for us, including Camilla. She worked for us for a moment, but then got the sack.’ She wasn’t alone. ‘He would shout and bellow so the building heard every word. He’d roar: “Get out, you silly b***h. Go – leave at once! I can’t have people like you in the firm!” when some poor girl had merely folded something the wrong way or done something very minor. The Duchess of Cornwall was one assistant who fell victim to his tantrums – she came in late having been to a dance.’

      Camilla couldn’t have cared less. But what made everyone at Colefax and Fowler laugh was that she was living at Claridges, hardly a minute’s walk away. Her grandmother, Sonia, a very wealthy woman, permanently kept a suite in the luxurious hotel and Camilla had been drying her hair in the window and fallen asleep.

      By then, her grandfather was dead and the family fortune had gone to Henry Cubitt, Camilla’s uncle and godfather, known as ‘Mad Harry’, the 4th Baron Ashcombe. He also inherited Denbies. When Rolie died in 1962, the Cubitts were the largest landowners in London after the Westminsters and Cadogans. They owned the whole of Pimlico; there were also vast estates in the South of France and Canada, but Harry was an alcoholic and virtually lost the lot. He moved in glitzier circles than his sister and in the good times had a house in Barbados, where Camilla went for some sunshine in the winter of 1971, taking her friend Virginia Carington with her. Harry was forty-seven and divorced; Virginia was twenty-five and fell for his charms. To everyone’s surprise, they married in 1973, but were divorced in 1979. Virginia now works at Clarence House running Charles and Camilla’s private diaries.

      Harry finally got on top of his addiction and was married a third time to another, much younger, woman, Elizabeth Dent-Brocklehurst, the Kentucky-born widow of his friend Mark. Mark Dent-Brocklehurst had died seven years earlier at the age of forty, leaving her two small children, Henry and Mollie; Sudeley Castle, a large 1,000-year-old property in Gloucestershire; and hefty death duties to be paid. Harry, who had never had any children himself, sold his own house, moved into Sudeley and spent the rest of his life helping to restore the castle, where Henry VIII’s widow Katherine Parr died, and turn it into a tourist attraction while working with addiction charities. He died in 2013.

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       Mrs PB

      Camilla married СКАЧАТЬ