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

Чтение книги онлайн.

      Camilla was the eldest child in the family. She was born with exceptional confidence, and it was that confidence, plus the support of her family, that would see her through the nightmare years. Both her parents and her two siblings would stare at one another in mystification. ‘Where did this come from?’ they would ask. Maybe it was being the first-born, maybe it was because she felt so safe in her small world, maybe it was in the genes, inherited from great-grandmother Alice Keppel, another strong and confident woman. Whatever it was, no one else in the immediate family, confident characters though they were, felt they had anything that approached Camilla’s.

      As a little girl she marched happily into school without looking back. She galloped her pony, and flew over jumps without an anxious thought. She charged into the sea and laughed at the waves. She was a natural leader, the one everyone wanted as their friend; a pretty, sunny child with fair curls and a calm disposition that everyone liked. She wasn’t rebellious – she left that to her sister Annabel, eighteen months younger. Annabel was the one with all the daring ideas. If ever they hatched a scheme – once it was tying rope across the road outside the house and waiting for cars to drive into it, another time dialling random numbers on the telephone and daring one another to say ‘You’re smelly!’ to whoever answered – Camilla would be in the thick of it, but never the instigator. The two girls were different then and are different now. As they grew older, Camilla was the funnier of the two but Annabel was the one who got things done – and she is the one who has always had a career. Their little brother, Mark, was closer to Annabel in age, and he grew up to be the biggest rebel of the three. As a family they wanted for nothing. There was plenty of money, their parents were devoted to one another, and all three children had supremely secure and happy childhoods.

      Major Bruce Middleton Shand and the Honourable Rosalind Maud Cubitt, as she then was, had married in 1946, the year after his liberation from a German prisoner-of-war camp where he had spent two years. Having lived for a year in London, where Camilla was born, they set up home together in the small village of Plumpton, at the foot of the South Downs, near Lewes in East Sussex, a culturally rich part of the world within easy commuting distance of London. Bruce took the train from Lewes to his office in Mayfair most mornings.

      Camilla hero-worshipped her father. She adored him without qualification, and he adored her. She loved her mother too, and her mother loved her, but her bond with her father was that very special one that sometimes exists between fathers and daughters, a relationship that lasted from her birth for the remainder of his long life. Her passion for horses came from his, and his passion for books became hers. He was the one who read stories to her when she was a little girl. He was a gentle soul, never judgemental, never sharp or disagreeable, but wise and thoughtful, and funny, and always there for her.

      The same could not be said for Bruce’s father. Philip Morton Shand, known professionally as P. Morton Shand, was a prolific writer and critic before the war. A very clever man who spoke French and German fluently, his own father had also been a writer and a barrister, and his mother’s family were all doctors. P. Morton was a colourful figure, a good friend of John Betjeman, the poet and architectural critic. He loved food and wine and in the preface to A Book of Food, published in 1927, he wrote, ‘This is frankly a book of prejudices, for all food is a question of likes and dislikes. One may be tolerant about religion, politics, and a hundred and one other things, but not about the food that one eats.’ His great-grandson, Tom Parker Bowles, Camilla’s son, who never knew him, would become an equally prolific and entertaining food writer.

      P. Morton’s main subject was architecture and for most of his professional life, he championed the modernist movement. He was friends with many of its key figures at that time, including Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier. By the end of his life he’d had a complete change of heart; as he wrote to Betjeman, ‘Contemporary architecture = the piling up of gigantic children’s toy bricks in utterly dehumanized and meaningless forms.’ Interesting that more than twenty years after his death, the Prince of Wales, the man so in love with P. Morton’s granddaughter, would be expressing the very same thoughts. Bruce scarcely knew his father, because amongst his other talents, P. Morton was a serial adulterer. Three years after Bruce’s birth in January 1917, he divorced Bruce’s mother, Edith Harrington, and disappeared from his son’s life. Bruce’s mother remarried Herbert Tippet, a golf course designer, and they moved to America, where they lived for some years in Westbury, Long Island. They returned to England when Bruce was ten, and thereafter his paternal grandmother, of whom he was very fond, had a big say in his upbringing. She had hopes he would become a doctor like her father, or a banker. But rather than sending him to Eton, P. Morton’s old school, she chose Rugby, in Warwickshire. ‘Rather illogically, and I think unfairly,’ he wrote about the boycott of Eton, ‘she attributed the plethora of wives, four in all, that my father collected to the influence of that seat of learning.’

      Rugby, where the game of rugby football originated, was not a success. He spent ‘not necessarily unhappy but infinitely drab years’ there and left ‘having learnt very little and having made practically no friends – on the whole a pretty unsatisfactory boy, rather indolent, self-conscious and inveterate’. But he did develop a love of books at Rugby and discovered horses, so rather than attempt medicine or money, it was tacitly agreed within the family that he should go into the Army for a few years.

      After a short spell in France, cut short by his grandfather’s death, he crammed for the entrance exam to the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, which he passed with flying colours in 1935 ‘despite having become, rather like my great-great-uncle, “imprudently” drunk on the second night of the exams’. His great-great-uncle had died young, having ‘been imprudently drinking too much before going out into the hot sun’. Bruce passed out of Sandhurst and joined the 12th Royal Lancers in 1937, having СКАЧАТЬ