Daughter of Empire: My Life as a Mountbatten
Pamela Hicks
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 1476733821
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
“Lady Pamela Hicks’s joyously entertaining new memoir, arguably the poshest book that ever has or will be written” (Newsweek), is a privileged glimpse into the lives and loves of some of the twentieth century’s leading figures.
Pamela Mountbatten entered a remarkable family when she was born in Madrid at the very end of the “Roaring Twenties.” Daughter of the glamorous heiress Edwina Ashley and Lord Louis Mountbatten, Pamela spent much of her early life with her sister, nannies, and servants—not to mention a menagerie of animals that included, at different times, a honey bear, chameleons, a bush baby, and a mongoose. Her parents’ vast social circle included royalty, film stars, celebrities, and politicians. Noel Coward invited Pamela to watch him film, and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. dropped in for tea.
However when war broke out Pamela and her sister were sent to New York to live with Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt, while the prime minister appointed her father to be the last Viceroy of India. Amid the turmoil, Pamela came of age, meeting the student leaders who had been released from jail, working in the canteen for Allied forces and in a clinic outside Delhi. She also developed a close bond with Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru.
“If you are addicted to Downton Abbey, chances are that you will relish Daughter of Empire, a British aristocrat’s memoir of her childhood and coming of age…She is also a keen observer of a way of life now vanished, except on PBS” (The Wall Street Journal). “Not many people remain who can tell stories like Lady Pamela Hicks” (Vanity Fair).
was there for me. I wasn’t exactly sure what my parents’ work really involved. I could imagine my mother improving conditions for Londoners at the mercy of the bombings but had never seen her at work outside of Southampton. The precise details of my father’s responsibilities were necessarily secret, and although his name came up on the news broadcasts that I watched with my classmates, I was not aware that he was overseeing plans for the invasion of Europe. When I learned that there had been a
surprise he presented me with a ring made out of shiny metal. I felt my cheeks heat up as I stammered a thank-you in my best Italian. It was the first ring I had ever been given, and when I examined it in the privacy of my room, I was amazed to see how intricate it was, how the man had somehow carved a little pattern on it. I never saw him again but I wore the ring proudly. Every prisoner could work if he so wished. Most helped on local farms, hedging, ditching, and doing seasonal chores, and
the poor comptroller on management practice down to every last bit of expenditure. Within a week she had moved on to the servants’ quarters, and by the end of April, she had been through everything. I accompanied her on many of her tours through the entire compound, including the stables, the primary school, and the dispensary, and I marveled at her ability to forge through the heat of the day, impervious to physical hardship. I wasn’t as robust, and on one particular tour of the bodyguards’
Grandmama—no fan of group photographs—positioned herself firmly on the edge of the group, leaving a little space between her and her neighbor, hoping she might be left out of the picture. I thought she looked particularly smart in the long black coat beautifully embroidered in white that my father had brought her from Kashmir. Princess Helena Victoria, known in the family as Thora, was in a wheelchair at the time and held her stick protectively against herself as if she expected the young Prince
chief—whom my father now addressed as “sir” as he had served under my father in SEAC and kept slipping back into old habits, absentmindedly addressing him as “sir.” Poor Sir Arthur John Power also had to deal with Prince Philip, who, joining the fleet as a junior officer, called him “sir.” Mindful that Prince Philip was married to the heir to the throne, the C in C couldn’t help but address his junior officer as “sir.” When we left that summer to spend some time with Yola and Henri, my mother