Lady In Waiting
Anne Glenconner
Hodder & Stoughton £20
If Lord ‘Downton Abbey’ Fellowes ever took LSD, he would doubtless start dictating a book like this.
Lady Glenconner was born Lady Anne Coke (‘pronounced “cook”’) and brought up at Holkham Hall in Norfolk, ‘the fifth-largest estate in England’.
Her parents were, she tells us, ‘one of the golden couples of high society’. Her mother was fun-loving, but her father was more buttoned-up and a bit of a nag. He was, she says, ‘always checking to make sure we had been to the lavatory properly’, though, annoyingly, she fails to elaborate on either how he checked or what ‘properly’ might mean in these circumstances.
Anne Glenconner with her husband books Colin, 3rd Baron Glenconner, and on the island of Mustique, 1973. He bought the island in 1958 for £45,000
Holkham Hall was full of servants, ‘some of whom had very distinctive characters’. We are left to imagine what their distinctive characters might have been, though she tells us that Mr Patterson, the head gardener, would play the bagpipes in the mornings ‘until my mother would shout, “That’s quite enough, Mr Patterson, thank you!”’
She had a horrid governess called Miss Bonner, who would punish her by tying her hands to the back of the bed and leaving her bound up all night. She deals with this in just three sentences – she is stalwartly unself-pitying – but it’s clear that Miss Bonner was criminally abusive. Years later, she received a card from Miss Bonner congratulating her on her engagement – it ‘triggered the most unpleasant rush of memories and made me physically sick’. For all its obvious absurdities, this book is underpinned by honesty.
Aged 16, Anne was sent off to finishing school, where ‘twenty-five girls per year were taught how to run a big house – their big house’. This largely involved flower-arranging and making drop scones, as well as learning ‘to perfect our conversation skills’. After all, ‘having the confidence to be the figurehead of a community, make little speeches and present awards was a skill that girls like me needed’.
Her father really wanted her to marry the improbably named Lord Stair, largely because he was such a good shot. But Lord Stair was the same age as her father, and Lady Anne was still a teenager. ‘He’s very nice, but no,’ said Lady Anne.
Instead, she ‘fell madly in love’ with ‘funny, handsome and charming’ Johnnie Althorp, but she made the fatal mistake of introducing him to the wicked Lady Fermoy, who then went and grabbed him for her own daughter. (The couple later gave birth to the girl who grew up to become Princess Diana.)
But every cloud has a silver lining. Soon, Anne was asked to be a Maid of Honour at the Queen’s Coronation, while her mother was asked to be a Lady of the Bedchamber no less. But they were both knocked into a cocked hat by the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire ‘because, as Mistress of the Robes, it was her job to assist the 5th Marquess of Cholmondeley, the Lord Great Chamberlain, who helped with the Queen’s costume changes’. Game, set and match!
She then fell in love with Colin Tennant, the son of 2nd Baron Glenconner. She describes young Colin as ‘terribly handsome’, though the photographs don’t bear this out. He was as bald as a coot. Her father considered his family nouveau riche because they had made their fortune from bleach. Colin also had ‘an unfortunate temper’. Might she have been better off with the 2nd Lord Harpic, or the 3rd Earl of Ajax?
Their honeymoon was a disaster, largely because she was ‘totally inexperienced’ when it came to sex. The first night ‘was awkward, painful’ and ‘Colin was obviously dissatisfied, which made me feel terribly awkward’. Awkward is one of her favourite words, others being ‘tiresome’, ‘palaver’ and ‘frightfully’. Prince Philip, for instance, is ‘frightfully bossy’.
Princess Margaret with the couple in 1972. For nearly 30 years Anne was a Lady-In-Waiting to Princess Margaret
The next night, Colin took her to a brothel and made her watch a naked couple having sex. ‘I found it perfectly disgusting.’ The couple asked if she would like to join in. ‘That’s very kind of you, but no thank you,’ she replied, politely. Who knows? Perhaps they had taught her the correct response at finishing school.
Colin had promised that, once they were married, he’d never lose his temper again. This proved not to be the case. On the Queen Mary she left a porthole open, and they were drenched. ‘Colin was incandescent, accusing me of having done it on purpose.’ He caught a cold and had to stay in bed, leaving Anne on her own to explore the ship, which was ‘quite a relief’.
Colin’s explosive temper pops up all over the book, so that it is almost a character in its own right. In Cuba he took her to a cock fight, and when a cockerel grabbed on to her head, and its spurs dug into her scalp, causing blood to drip down her face, Colin was ‘absolutely furious, shouting at me that I had ruined the cock fight and ruined all the bets that had been placed’.
She insists that Colin had abundant qualities, with a ‘combination of intense charm, quick wit and intelligence’ but she provides no examples, unless you count his party trick of wearing paper knickers then putting his hands down his trousers, ripping them off and stuffing them into his mouth. For all Lady Glenconner’s special pleading, he comes across as a thoroughly nasty piece of work: self-centred, feckless, snobbish and cruel. ‘I once asked him why he screamed at people, and he replied, “I like making them squirm. I like making them frightened.”’
Is the entire book an unconscious act of revenge?
He was, needless to say, serially unfaithful, with ‘lots of girlfriends, some I knew of, others I didn’t’. One of them was an ‘African American lady, for whom he had bought a nail bar in America. I only found out about her when she went to the press and I read about how he had broken her wrist. Hopefully her wrist healed well enough for her to carry on doing people’s nails.’
For nearly 30 years Anne was a Lady-In-Waiting to Princess Margaret. This was a relatively undemanding position, not unlike a nanny. ‘When we arrived somewhere new, I did things like find out where the lavatories were so that she wouldn’t have to ask.’ She sometimes had to undertake more peculiar chores, like turning the hose on Princess Michael’s cats.
Throughout it all, she loved Princess Margaret – ‘We became firm friends’ – but theirs was a lopsided friendship, with Princess Margaret issuing the commands and Anne obeying them. Anne and Colin gave Princess Margaret a piece of land on Mustique as a wedding present. ‘Does it come with a house?’ asked Princess Margaret, so they were obliged to agree that it did. When they went swimming in Mustique, Anne would have to swim sideways, treading water, so that they could continue a conversation. Having written a book about Margaret, I was worried that there would be lots of information about her that I had failed to unearth. But apart from one or two little catchphrases – ‘What about another little drinkie-winkie?’ – there isn’t much new.
Two-thirds of the way through the book, the atmosphere darkens. Up to that point, the tone has been jolly, camp and slightly daft, like so many aristocratic memoirs. But all of a sudden, tragedy piles upon tragedy. Two of her sons die young, one from Aids at 29, and another at 39 from the after-effects of heroin addiction. Her third son suffers a devastating motorbiking accident on his gap year. She and Colin fly out to be with him. During the flight, ‘much to Colin’s irritation, I just couldn’t stop crying’.
When Colin died in 2010 he left all his fortune to a Trinidadian servant on whom he had developed some sort of fixation, and nothing at all to Anne, his long-suffering wife of 54 years. ‘I screamed and screamed and screamed into the pitch-black night,’ she recalls.
But she is a trouper and refuses to let life get her down. She now lives by herself in a modest house in Norfolk. ‘At the age of 87,’ she concludes, ‘I am very happy.’