Mount - Kiss Myself Goodbye : The Many Lives of Aunt Munca

In memory of Georgie

Contents

Birth, and copulation, and death.

Thats all the facts when you come to brass tacks.

T.S. Eliot, Sweeney Agonistes

This is not a Life. It isnt a nice rounded biography nestling in the reliable recollections of friends and family. In this book, nobodys recollections are reliable. It is a personal memoir that turned into a quest while I wasnt looking, a frustrating sort of quest in half a dozen separate stages which at first didnt seem to connect, not least because each stage was criss-crossed by false trails and blocked off by outright lies.

Its my own quest entirely, and any errors or misunderstandings are mine and nobody elses. I can only say that I have tried to uncover the truth as far as I could retrieve it from the corrosions of time. The truth turns out to be painful well, thats no surprise but I didnt expect how gay the lies would be.

F.M.

Sometimes, even now, I try to get to sleep by recalling, in the right order, the houses where my Aunt Betty lived. There is, to start with, Blue Waters, Angmering-on-Sea, in West Sussex, a low-slung added-on-to white cottage with blue shutters that seems to have sunk below the level of the garden. The lawn behind the house runs down or rather up to the sea wall. Beyond the sea wall you can just see the heads of the taller passers-by stumbling along the pitiless shingle. In the middle of the lawn there is a small round pond with stone steps surrounding it and a lead cherub that dribbles water onto some dozy goldfish. Nearer the house there are rose beds that my aunt prunes so hard I cannot imagine them ever flowering in the summer, though they do, big cabbagey blooms in violent reds and oranges, to be deadheaded just as hard as soon as they show the first sign of being over. If it is hot, she wears a strange playsuit knitted loosely like a string bag for the deadheading; it looks out of place and childish on her leathery limbs. Along the side of the garden a line of conifers pines, I think, they smell piney swish gently in the sea wind and confer a quiet you do not expect so close to the sea.

When my sister and I first go there in the summer of 1945, there are concrete tank barriers ranged across the middle of the garden, like the teeth of some underground giant who has been munching up the lawn. I am six and Francie is four. I like to think of the German tanks smashing through the garden wall and then getting stuck on the tank barriers, giving us time to arrest the crews and give them cups of tea while we wait for the police to arrive. But then the Panzers might never get this far. For if you open the gate in the wall, there in front of you are the tangled, already-rusted girders of the tank traps that are the first line of our anti-tank defences, and running in and out of them the restless, milky sea that sweeps beyond them up to the top of the shingle at high tide. The traps linger on for years after the barriers on the lawn have been removed. They are encrusted with barnacles and dried seaweed, and it is easy to bark your bare legs as you climb through them on the way down to find a patch of sand. Only at low tide is there any real stretch of sand, and then the sea is too shallow to swim in without wading out miles.

I like to think of Angmering as eternally menaced by invaders. My uncle insisted that this was probably where Julius Caesar came ashore in 55 bc , though the history books I read all agreed that the Romans waded onto the shingle miles along the coast at Pevensey. I loyally stuck, however, to the Angmering theory, in my dreams seeing the Roman chariots with knives sticking out of the wheels creaking up the beach, and then falling foul of the great concrete blocks that, in the dream anyway, were already in place.

Georgie, FM, Francie at Blue Waters, summer 1945

At first my uncle and aunt rent Blue Waters. Then, when the owner wants it back, they rent the place next door, White Wings, a larger affair with Dutch gables painted pink and a pillared loggia. After White Wings they move inland, to Castlewood House, Englefield Green, Surrey, a white stucco mansion also with blue shutters, more of a turquoise blue, and lovely gardens stretching down the slope to the edge of Windsor Great Park. There is a little gate into the park at the end of the garden and you can walk across a narrow plank bridge over the ditch beyond the fence and through the forest to Virginia Water. If you go around the left-hand side of the lake, you come to an artificial waterfall known as the Cascade, and beyond the Cascade you come to the Roman ruins brought from Leptis Magna near Tripoli to amuse George IV and re-erected here, rather inaccurately, by Sir Jeffry Wyatville, his court architect. At times during the bombardment of Libya in 2011, it looks as though these may be the only ruins of Leptis Magna to survive, although NATO assures us that their commitment to avoid collateral damage includes the great archaeological sites. It is a strange place for them to land up, though, within earshot of the traffic from the A30.

Castlewood is the sort of house described as imposing, and years later Prince Andrew and Fergie take a lease on it, from 1987 to 1990, which is about half of their brief and stormy marriage. At Castlewood, for the first and perhaps only time in my life with them, my uncle and aunt entertain on quite a scale. Their guests are mostly showbiz people who have alighted in the neighbourhood, which is handy for the film studios and for the West End too.

Aunt Betty has the dining room redecorated for the entertaining. A fashionable painter-designer called Arthur Barbosa is commissioned to do trompe-lil landscapes round the walls. Barbosa specializes in the Regency style. He is the illustrator whom Georgette Heyer prefers for her dust-jackets of Regency bucks handing dangerous ladies out of curricles, and the Castlewood murals are in this line. He also does theatrical designs and he decorated the inside of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylors yacht. Sometimes the dining-room door is left open and I can peer in and watch him at work on his stepladder. It is exciting to watch his brush moving steadily over the plaster. To me Arthur looks infinitely dashing with his mustachios and his piercing eyes, just like an artist should. Apparently he thinks so too, because when he does the colourful jackets for the first Flashman novels, he models the figure of Flashy on himself in a dashing blue uniform, which does not entirely please their author, George MacDonald Fraser. On the dining-room walls Arthur is painting only in black, grey and white, and I wonder why because I am too young to have heard of grisaille. Anyway, it is piquant to think of the Duke and Duchess of York 30 years later having their stonking rows there while the phaetons and curricles trot on along the walls with their ladies and bucks on top.

To this elegant dining room comes, among other stars, Mary Martin, who has rented nearby while she is singing Im Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair in the West End production of South Pacific . A couple of times she brings over her teenage son, Larry Hagman, who is going to be an actor too and later reaches superstardom as JR in Dallas . Closer and more permanent friends are Nanette Newman and Bryan Forbes, who is a bit like my Uncle Greig in looks the wavy hair, the smiley eyes though in nothing else. To me, easily the most thrilling neighbour is Diana Dors, who lives in the village and often rings up for a chat. There is nothing like the shock of hearing her voice when I happen to answer the phone. She was born in Swindon and her husky voice still has a touch of Wiltshire in it: Hi, this is Di Dors, and who am I speaking to?