The Duchess: The Untold Story – the explosive biography, as seen in the Daily Mail. Penny Junor
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fought heroically in the First World War and was left with what today would be called post-traumatic stress disorder. Sonia didn’t much like him to begin with and thought Violet had made an odd choice – he was neither literary nor artistic, which were the sort of people her sister liked to be around, but she warmed to him ‘when I discovered that he had a sense of the ridiculous very much like mine’. But Violet never did – and the lack of feeling was mutual. Alice threatened to stop Violet’s allowance unless she married Denys and she bankrolled him for some time, repeatedly refusing to let the pair file for an annulment. When Violet finally accepted that her affair with Vita was over, she and Denys moved to France, but they became completely estranged. She had a lengthy affair there with the Princess de Polignac, formerly Winaretta Singer, a daughter of the American sewing machine millionaire Isaac Singer. Her husband, Prince Edmond de Polignac, was a discreet homosexual.
Sonia Keppel’s marriage was infinitely happier than her sister’s – although it did end in divorce. She met Roland Cubitt in 1918. ‘Rolie’s greatest charm,’ she wrote, ‘was his gaiety. With his bright eyes and inexhaustible capacity for enjoyment, he looked like an alert fox terrier, eager for exercise … I began to invest Rolie himself with practically every romantic quality: Adonis’s beauty; the chivalry of Sir Lancelot; the fidelity of Leander; the heroism of King Arthur. Being an essentially simple person, had he realised this he would have been extremely embarrassed by it … In his happy way he took people as he found them and he expected them to do the same about him.’
They were unofficially engaged for a year before she was invited to spend a weekend at Denbies, the family seat, to meet his parents. She was terrified and had been warned in advance that Lord Ashcombe led family prayers every morning, Lady Ashcombe didn’t like fashionable girls, she liked them to look natural and to wear gloves at all times, and no one was allowed to smoke in the drawing room or to play cards on Sundays. She lowered the hem of her dress specially in preparation for the visit and used only minimal face powder.
Throughout tea, on the afternoon of their arrival, Lady Ashcombe referred to Sonia in the third person singular. ‘“Will the young lady have sugar in her tea? Will the young lady have a scone and some home-made strawberry jam?” Half dead with fright, I had a feeling that, by these indirect references, she was inferring that I had been deprived of my passport.’ It wasn’t until Monday morning that she detected anything approaching a thaw. ‘Still terribly nervous, somehow or other my restless hands got hold of a piece of knotted string which, unconsciously, I began to unravel. As she watched me, with sudden warmth in her voice, Lady Ashcombe commented: “I like young ladies who undo string!” Dared I hope by that remark that she had decided to return me my passport?’
His parents insisted the couple were too young to marry, but in reality were not keen on their son, and now heir, marrying the daughter of the King’s mistress. Alice expressed concerns too, but not about their age. ‘It isn’t that I don’t like Rolie,’ she had said, ‘I think he’s very nice. But if you marry him, you’ll marry into a world you’ve never known, and I’m not at all sure that you’ll like it.’
In comparison to the exotic and exciting world Sonia had known for the first twenty years of her life, the Ashcombes’ world was certainly very conservative and oppressive. Sonia had always been chaperoned but she had been allowed a great deal of freedom, and she was a brave, fashionable and feisty young woman. When a general, a big broad man, who had promised her mother he would act as her chaperon, made a sudden lunge for her in the back of a brougham between the Ritz Hotel and the Albert Hall, heading for the first big event of the 1919 London Season, she scratched his face. ‘“What a little tigress it is!” he exclaimed delightedly. “Quite able to fend for itself really, without a chaperon!”’ With silent intensity she fought him all the way, and by the time they arrived at the ball, her dress was torn, the powder gone from her nose and her shoulder had a big bruise. The general, on the other hand, had a face criss-crossed with red scratches and a swollen left thumb that clearly bore teeth-marks where she had bitten him. ‘As the brougham drove up to the entrance, he looked at me and burst out laughing. “Never enjoyed a drive so much in my life!” he exclaimed. “Now, run along, and tidy up, before I hand you over.”’
And when her parents took her off for a three-week winter sports holiday in Switzerland, to the Palace Hotel in St Moritz, home to the famous Cresta Run, she had not been there for twenty-four hours before she’d taken up bobsleighing and agreed to take part in the Bobsleigh Derby, the big event of the bobsleighing calendar. She joined two teams of complete strangers; in one she was with a crew of four men, in the other with two men, and she was to do the steering. They had bumped into some old friends in the hotel, the Duke of Alba and the Duke and Duchess of Santona, and it was Jack Santona’s suggestion. Her mother pointed out that Sonia had no experience of bobsleighing, but having established that she was not frightened by the prospect of racing downhill through a deep ravine of ice, with steep banks and corners, at up to 70 mph, neither she nor her father let their own misgivings spoil her pleasure. Sonia not only survived, her team won the race in which she steered and she came away with the Vlora Cup. One of her fellow steerswomen was not so lucky; when she took one of the bends too high, the boblet flipped over and crushed her leg so badly it had to be amputated.
After two years of unofficial engagement, Rolie’s parents finally came round to the marriage. He and Sonia officially announced it in the spring of 1920 and were married that autumn at the Guards Chapel of Wellington Barracks. In the intervening time, Alice negotiated her daughter’s marriage settlement. Lord Ashcombe had demanded a meeting with her husband, George, but arrived to find just Alice waiting to speak to him. She played the interview like a poker hand, luring Ashcombe into bidding very much higher than he had originally intended. She won, and ‘When, still shaken, he had expressed the hope that this (expensive?) marriage would last, grandiloquently Mamma had answered: “My dear Lord Ashcombe, neither you nor I can legislate for eternity.”’
5
Bruce and Rosalind were a golden couple who seemed to have everything: good looks, charm, class, money, healthy children and a happy marriage, one that did last an eternity. Bruce was a genial, cultured man who loved art and music as well as his horses. He was courteous, immaculately dressed, scrupulously polite, always smiling; a man to whom people immediately warmed. So was Rosalind. She was big-bosomed, big-hearted, generous and tactile. She too dressed smartly in skirts and suits, with bright red lipstick, but she was less conventional than she looked. She invariably had a small cigar in one hand, and liked her children’s friends to call her by her first name, which was unusual in the 1950s. She was a strong woman from a long line of strong women.
Rosalind could be sharp – she didn’t appreciate being called Ros – but she was very funny and famed for her throwaway lines. When a teenage Camilla and her friend, Priscilla, were dressed up to the nines, ready to hit the town of Brighton for the evening, she said, ‘My God, Camilla, you look just like Mandy Rice-Davies with spots!’ For all that, she was hugely caring. Every Wednesday for seventeen years she went to Chailey Heritage, a school for the disabled outside Lewes, where she worked as a volunteer with thalidomide children. She only stopped when the pain of her osteoporosis made it impossible to make the journey.
The house in East Sussex where they settled after Camilla’s birth, a seven-bedroom former rectory, called The Laines – initially they rented it – is not classically beautiful. But its position, nestling at the foot of the South Downs with not another building in sight, is hard to beat, and the garden that Rosalind created, like a series of rooms, is still beautiful. The main section was built in the eighteenth century in the local style of flint and red brick, with later additions; the ivy-clad house sits on a slight incline at the end of a gravel driveway, in complete seclusion, surrounded by five acres of garden, with fields belonging to the neighbouring farm beyond. It’s big but not grand, essentially a comfortable family home, with light, airy rooms, high ceilings