The Telegraph
Pamela Hicks: 'I admired my mother, but I never liked her'
We’re trying to work out if Lady Pamela Hicks is the only living witness to the behind-the-scenes dramas of Indian Independence Day in 1948, which she observed as the 18-year-old daughter of Lord Mountbatten, the last Viceroy. “Well, I was speaking on the telephone recently to Gandhiji’s granddaughter,” she confides. “She seems to think she saw everything, too, but she was only nine at the time. I don’t count that.”
...That connection with the Windsors has meant that Lady Pamela – “Pammy” to friends and family – has been there, or thereabouts, at some of the key moments in 20th century history. As well as her handmaiden role at the end of empire in India, she was one of the tiny group with Princess Elizabeth in Kenya in 1952 on the morning the princess heard that her father, George VI, had died and that she was now Queen. “I’m pretty sure,” she says, running through the others in her mind, “that I’m the only one left.”She was a bridesmaid at the royal wedding in 1947, too.
...There are also witty pen portraits of the assembled European royals – most of them distant relatives of Lady Pamela’s. Crown Princess Juliana of the Netherlands “causes a stir” by bemoaning that “everyone’s jewellery is so dirty”. “It was typical of Princess Juliana to say such a thing, for she was very down to earth.” So what does Lady Pamela think of the more relaxed style of today’s Dutch and Scandinavian royal families? “Everybody talks about how they spend their time bicycling around their capital cities,” she says, “but I can tell you that the Stockholm palace is infinitely bigger than Buckingham Palace, and they still have plenty of flunkeys.”
Lady Pamela’s own domestic set-up is more modest. She lives in a beautiful manor house in the south Oxfordshire countryside. The influence of David Hicks is all about us. A designer who made his name in the Swinging Sixties, he and Lady Pamela married at the start of that decade – “an unorthodox match”, she writes in her memoir, but a happy one right up to his death in 1998... There have been biographies of David Hicks, including one, she recounts with horror, “which described me as having led a very sheltered life in the countryside before my marriage. That is why I felt obliged to mention in my book that I had 10 proposals of marriage before I met David.”
If her own marriage was blessed, Lady Pamela writes candidly about the strains on her parents’ union. “My mother had at least 18 lovers,” she says as if describing pairs of shoes, “but my father, to my knowledge, only had one other. The saving grace was that he wasn’t jealous.” Among Edwina Mountbatten’s reported love affairs was one with “Panditji” Nehru, the first Indian Prime Minister, which is said to have played out while her husband was bringing an end to British rule. While accepting that the two were very close, Lady Pamela disagrees with those biographers who claim that a physical relationship took place between the two. She does so not to protect her mother’s reputation, but because she doubts they ever had the opportunity to be alone, with so many servants and officials always in attendance.
“I never liked her,” she says unflinchingly of her mother. “She had no idea of how to play with children, unlike my father. She was a woman who could never have a personal conversation with you, and who needed constant flattery. If she didn’t have that, she became lonely and miserable.
...Lady Pamela and her sister [who became Countess Mountbatten after their father was murdered by the IRA in 1979] attended the wedding of William and Kate – “they were kind enough to invite us” – but her days playing any part in the royal set-up are over, she says. “There comes a moment, when you have as large a family as the Queen does, when you just have to have a cull and cut out all the people over 80.”
Trond Noren Isaksen
The memoirs of the children of famous parents and of former courtiers have in common that they are frequently rather dull, dreary and over-careful not to say anything that is not already known. The autobiography of Lady Pamela Hicks...is an exception to this rule...Lady Pamela Hicks tells the story of her early years with humour and a sharp eye for the telling detail.
...The portrayal of her paternal grandmother, Victoria, Marchioness of Milford Haven, stands out as one of the most memorable aspects of the book, along with her loving depiction of the time she spent in India with her parents during that country’s transition from colonial status to independence.
...There had been marital approaches made by Prince Georg of Denmark, who was turned down by Lord Mountbatten without Lady Pamela having been consulted. There was a romance with a Lebanese man and, we are told, ten proposals of marriage.
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