Lady in Waiting
Hodder & Stoughton 326pp £20 The Week Bookshop £16.99
“The memoirs of the British aristocracy are, by and large, almost as dire as those written by an equally vainglorious breed: our politicians,” said Miranda Seymour in the FT. Not this one. Anne Glenconner’s Lady in
Waiting is a “candid, witty and stylish” account of a life spent “in the shadow of the Crown”. The daughter of the Earl of Leicester, Anne grew up in Holkham Hall, Norfolk, down the road from Sandringham, where she often went to play with a young Princess Margaret. In 1953, she helped carry the Queen’s train at the coronation, and in 1971 she became Princess Margaret’s lady-in-waiting – staying in the role for three decades. The chief “glory” of this book lies in its “reports from the front” about Glenconner’s life with Margaret (above) and with her husband, two “entertaining monsters”, whom she nevertheless describes in affectionate and nuanced terms.
In 1956, aged 23, she married Colin Tennant, heir to Baron Glenconner, said Richard Davenport-Hines in The Times. They got on well, she writes, “apart from his infidelity and his temper”. Tennant was prone to “towering, ungovernable tantrums”: he once bit a taxi driver, and on another occasion was dragged screaming off a plane because he was so angry that his seat wasn’t in first class. He liked shocking people: he wore paper underpants, so he could remove them and stuff them into his mouth. Anne insists that her husband had abundant charm and intelligence, but he seems to have been a “thoroughly nasty piece of work”, said Craig Brown in The Mail on Sunday. Dissatisfied by the first night of their honeymoon in Paris, he took her on the second to a brothel and made her watch a couple having sex. (“That’s very kind, but no thank you,” she said when invited to join in.) After his death in 2010, Anne found out that he’d left his entire fortune to a Trinidadian manservant upon whom he’d become fixated.
There is a “painful” disjunction in Lady in Waiting between “the outward whirl of her life and the repeated tragedies that befall her family”, said Rachel Cooke in The Observer. Of her three sons, two have died: one from an illness connected with heroin addiction, the other from Aids. While her “fortitude” in the face of such events is admirable, she admits that her sons were “victims” of a “cold and inflexible” style of raising children, based on “emotional distance”. And so this book, as well as being a “funny and sometimes dazzling” record of a largely vanished way of life, is also an “examination of English repression: both of how it gets you through and how it can slay you”.