Anne Glenconner: ‘I took my courage from Princess Margaret’

Craig Brown is responsible for the astonishing late flowering of Anne Glenconner. It was his biography Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret that so enraged her that, in an effort to stick up for her friend, whom she served as a lady-in-waiting for 30 years, Lady Glenconner started writing in her mid-eighties. She hasn’t stopped since.

First came an internationally best-selling memoir, Lady in Waiting, then two pacy novels. And now, coinciding with her 90th birthday, as well as (no flies on her) the new season of The Crown, Christmas etc, she publishes this volume of ‘life lessons’ – a catch-all, really, for any other top toff reflections from this most likeable of survivors.

Success, she says, ‘has come as a most marvellous surprise’. She likes the selling part, the promotion. Finding herself invited on to Graham Norton’s red sofa at the BBC, she asked her friend and Mustique mucker Rupert Everett to help her prep:

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He was very kind and advised me to launch straight into the story of the night in Paris just after our wedding when Colin took me to a live sex show at a brothel. I did, and the audience began to laugh in all the right places, so I let rip. By the time the show ended I was on an absolute high. Afterwards, Chadwick Boseman, the American actor and star of Black Panther, who’d also been on the show, came up to me and said: ‘Gee whiz, lady!’ I thought, well, goodness, now I’ve arrived.

It’s rather like having lunch with her. Charm itself. And if you go down the audio-book route you can also enjoy her marvellously comforting, unflappable voice, and those vowels that ought to be listed by English Heritage: the ‘gawn’s and ‘orf’s and ‘goff’s that The Crown didn’t quite dare recreate, probably thinking no one would believe them. Part of her success comes from the old-world solidity and decorousness she embodies: her utter lack of introspection or guff.

She previously wrote about Colin Tennant, her monstrous, charismatic, visionary husband, the laird of Mustique, with such distance that he shone as a sort of literary creation, to be put safely on a shelf beside Hons and Rebels. This time, however, she is determined to dig a little deeper: ‘Looking back at Lady in Waiting now, I can see I wrote about Colin and our marriage in a rather breezy way, playing up the absurdity of his behaviour in order to laugh about it.’ It was a coping mechanism, as well as a deeply entrenched cultural attitude. Putting on a brave face was what she was brought up to do. ‘I took my courage from Princess Margaret, who was a great believer that one didn’t dwell.’

In one of his rages, on their young twin daughters’ birthday, Colin beat Anne around the head with his shark-bone walking stick. Retreating to her room, she hid all night, ‘too scared to come out of the bedroom through the door in case Colin was waiting outside. I was certain that he had gone completely mad.’ One of her eardrums burst and she never regained hearing in it. Their redoubtable nanny Barbara told Colin off. He’d listen to her, of course.

After this incident, Anne found vital ways of distancing herself from her husband, including getting a gypsy caravan, which she installed in the grounds of Glen, their Scottish home, while her mother issued an ultimatum: never again, or the marriage was over. This worked. In denial to a certain extent, Anne used to donate to Erin Pizzey’s Refuge shelters for women, but didn’t see the link to herself.

Her relationship with her three sons, all troubled in different ways, is only touched on here, sometimes obliquely, but it is brilliantly expounded in the first book, in which we hear about Charlie having to be disinherited owing to his struggles with heroin, about Henry’s suppressed homo-sexuality, and a mindblowing account of how this mother’s love and willpower helped her son Christopher out of a coma after a motor-cycle accident in Belize, aged 20. For anyone new to Anne Glenconner, Lady in Waiting is the place to start. It’s a perfectly judged book, and Hannah Bourne-Taylor, who helped her write it, is now a distinctive voice on conservation matters.

Still, for fans and those left wanting more, Whatever Next? is a great addendum, expanding the original’s ideas and adding bonus material, some upsetting, some droll. (Until her son put her right, Anne thought the boutique Granny Takes a Trip was a place to get clothes for a short holiday.)

Ironically, given Anne’s original intention of championing her, Princess Margaret remains distinctly unrehabilitated by the end of the book. On an official trip to Venezuela, the princess sneaks off behind Anne’s back and zooms into the sky, secretly determined to see Angel Falls from above, even though she’d been officially banned from boarding the unsafe plane:

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‘Am I getting a ticking off?’ she asked, on landing. 

   ‘Yes you are ma’am,’ I said. 

   ‘But it was all fine,’ she said stubbornly. 

Two days later the plane crashed and was completely destroyed. 

Another time, the princess had some American guests to stay, who, thinking they were accompanying her to St Paul’s for the royal wedding in 1981, came downstairs beautifully dressed, only to be shown the TV and some sandwiches. ‘I couldn’t hide how I felt when she told me about this, and said frankly that it was very awkward to have left them there,’ Anne writes, adding that ‘princesses occasionally need to know when they’ve been rude’.

In a strange way, though, Anne’s love for Princess Margaret is infectious, and we start to understand their bond when we learn how kind the princess was about Charlie’s addiction, and how she turned a blind eye to the little incident when he ripped photos of her dressed as Mae West out of the family photo album and sold them, via a friend, to the Daily Mail.

Part of what makes Anne Glenconner a great memoirist must be her good manners, because she never bores or boasts or lectures us, although these same good manners don’t make her a very persuasive spokes-person for other daughters of earls, who, like her, can’t inherit. ‘Understandably, it’s a long way down the list of government priorities at the moment,’ she says, sweetly. ‘I hope it does happen eventually, and women are no longer excluded.’

Sometimes Anne seems like she has been made up as a parody by Craig Brown, especially when she is describing family snacks such as ‘velvet’ – ‘the thick layer of skin shed from the antlers of the deer in Holkham park, which was collected, fried and served on toast as a delicacy’ – or relating how, as a young girl, her grandfather put her in charge of airing the Leicester Codex, Leonardo da Vinci’s original treatise on water and stars. But no, she really exists, and we must celebrate her.