Lady in Waiting by Anne Glenconner review – fascinating portrait of English repression

The marriage and social milieu of Princess Margaret’s childhood friend reveals a vanished era of upper-class eccentricity

Being very common, I have something of a mania for aristo-lit: a passion for stories about big houses and the wanton eccentrics who inhabit them that began in childhood with Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, continued into my teenage years with all things Mitford, and now finds ongoing sustenance mostly in diaries (Chips Channon, I salute you, and all who sailed in you). Nevertheless, I have to admit to being somewhat unprepared for Lady in Waiting, in which Anne Glenconner muses on her stiff upper lip and how it saw her through a marriage lasting 54 years to a man whose idea of a honeymoon treat was to take her – a girl who had been a virgin only hours before – to a fleapit of a hotel to watch two strangers having sex (“That’s very kind, but no thank you,” she said when invited to join in). Is her memoir a horror show or a delightful entertainment? A manual for how to live, or how not to live? In truth, I’m not sure even she would know the answer to these questions.

The eldest child of the fifth Earl of Leicester, Glenconner was maid of honour at the Queen’s coronation and lady-in-waiting to her childhood friend Princess Margaret. She grew up at Holkham Hall in Norfolk – a house so huge that if the footmen put raw eggs in a bain-marie as they walked from kitchen to nursery, they’d be boiled on arrival – and, aged 23, married Colin Tennant, later Lord Glenconner, the owner of a Scottish castle called Glen and of the Caribbean island of Mustique. Tennant was, she tells us repeatedly, great fun and so generous. But it can’t have been too much fun when he deliberately trapped her in the fold-up bed in their cabin on a train, or when he took her to a cock fight (one of the cocks attached itself to her head, causing it to bleed; far from being sympathetic, he was furious that she’d ruined the betting).

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/35rLmaU