Past Imperfect (16 page)

If you can imagine it, forty years ago, we had that fascination for virtually anyone with genuine Royal blood in their veins. I don't just mean snobs. Everyone. Because we knew nothing, we wondered about everything and the glamour Royals brought into a social gathering is quite unparalleled today. No film star at the peak of her success can confer anything like the excitement of finding Princess Margaret among the dancers in a ballroom in the Fifties or Sixties. Or at a cocktail party, to walk in and discover a ducal cousin of the Queen chatting in the corner was to know that
this
was the place to be tonight. In my own youth, in 1961 to be exact, my school once bussed all the boys, plus thirty musical instruments, for a bumpy hour across Yorkshire so that we could solemnly stand on the grass verge at the side of the road and cheer the cars carrying the wedding party of the Duke of Kent from York Minster to the bride's home at Hovingham. Six hundred boys, however many buses, a brass band specially rehearsed, all in order to watch some cars that did not stop nor even, as I remember, slow down. Perhaps the bride and groom did a little, at least my image of the young Duchess is in focus, but not the others. The band played, we waved and feverishly shouted our hip-hip-hoorays, the cavalcade shot past, blurred faces in Molyneux and Hartnell, and then they were gone. The whole thing took five minutes from start to finish, if that. Then we climbed back into the buses and returned to school.

So it was that even a member of a minor, deposed Royal house seemed to confer a favour on every invitation they accepted in those dead days, and Dagmar was no exception. Her dynasty, the Grand Ducal House of Moravia, was not in fact very ancient. It had been one of those invented families, installed by the Great Powers in different Balkan states as the Turkish Empire gradually disintegrated throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. During those years, German and Danish, and in some cases local, princes were pushed on to thrones in Romania and Bulgaria, in Montenegro and Serbia, in Albania and Greece. Just such a one was the mountainous and modest state of Moravia, which bordered on almost all of the above. The Turkish governor having finally retreated in early 1882, a minor princeling of the House of Ludinghausen-Anhalt-Zerbst was selected, largely on the basis of his being a godson of the then Prince of Wales. Whether or not his selection reflected the British Prince's close friendship with the boy's mother at the time of his birth I could not say, although Lord Salisbury was asked by Marlborough House, as a personal favour, to suggest Prince Ernst for the post, thereby signalling our government's approval. Since the territory was not much larger than the estate of an English duke, and considerably less profitable, it was not thought that a kingly crown would be appropriate and at the Settlement of Klasko, in April 1883, the area was solemnly proclaimed a grand duchy.

It must be said that the wife of the new Grand Duke was not enthusiastic. Until then, she had been having quite a jolly time between their home in Vienna and a sporting estate in the Black Forest, and after two years she was still writing to a friend that she thought she lacked an important requirement for the job, namely the smallest desire to remain in Moravia, but the couple persevered with some success. Their new country's good fortune was to be located at a sensitive crossroads of many of the trade routes. This ensured invitations to every Royal fete around the world, as well as cheering offers for their daughters' hands in marriage, and before very long a Russian grand duchess, an Austrian archduchess and a princess of Borbon-Anjou had all begun life in the airless, cramped nurseries of the hideously uncomfortable palace in the capital of Olomouc, a building not much larger than the dean's residence in the close at Salisbury and a lot less manageable to run.

Surprisingly, perhaps, Grand Ducal Moravia made it as far as the Jazz Age, but the forces of Stalin, coupled with a swelling resistance to the monarchist solution, proved the undoing of the dynasty. By 1947 it was over and the ex-reigning Moravian family had taken up residence in a five-storey house in Trevor Square, a pleasant enough location and very convenient for Harrods.

But even easy shopping could not revive the spirits of the defeated Grand Duke and in a matter of months he had given up the unequal struggle. It was at this point that his son, having assumed the grand ducal title, the last of his family to do so, and released perhaps by the demise of his august papa, made a spirited decision that would vastly diminish his chances of regaining the throne of his forebears and vastly increase his chances of living well in the interim. With the dignified, if pained, acceptance of his widowed mother, a princess of a cadet branch of the Hohenzollerns, he contracted to marry the only daughter of a businessman from Leeds, one Harold Swindley, who had made a fortune in self-catering, package holidays. In the following three years, two children had arrived to bless this most sensible of unions, the new, so-called Crown Prince Feodor and his sister, the Princess Dagmar.

But for us, and even more for our parents, the Fall of the House of Moravia was still pretty recent and even the elevation of Miss Marion Swindley could not dim the lustre of a genuine crown. Only twenty years had passed since their deposition when Dagmar arrived at our parties. Besides, the Communist regime that replaced them was not popular, the family was still on the guest list at Buckingham Palace and there was talk at the time of a restoration coming in Spain. In short, forty years ago the Royalist cause didn't seem hopeless by any means.

The new Grand Duchess had delivered. The Swindley money may not have been particularly fragrant but, for the first years of the marriage at least, there was quite a lot of it. And she learned her part pretty well until, like every fervent convert, she was soon
plus Catholique que le Pape
. Admittedly, she was not by any standards a beauty but, as the Dowager Grand Duchess was once heard to sigh when watching her daughter-in-law stump across a drawing room looking like a Marine in training, 'Oh, well. One can't have
everything
,' and nobody could say she was not impressive. Her size alone guaranteed that. Nor was she a fool, having inherited more from her (discreetly invisible) father than she might care to admit in terms of solid, common sense.

For all the bowing and ma'am'ing that still went on in those days, the Grand Duchess understood that no throne awaited her timid daughter in the post-war world. She also knew that she had not anticipated the drain on her capital made by a husband who wished to live
en prince
but did not intend to do a day's work, nor earn a single penny. She was, at heart, a sound northern lass and well aware that no fortune can hope to survive when the expenses are limitless and the income nil, and she was anxious to see the girl settled as well as might be, before the gilt had quite gone off the gingerbread. So she decided that, even though British princesses by that stage never 'came out' in any normal way and only occasionally appeared at the parties of special friends, nevertheless Dagmar would participate fully in the whole year-long business. The girl would thereby build a position for herself in British Society and, with any luck, land one of its prizes. The Grand Duchess also accepted - unlike many, if not most, Royals - that she would have to put her hand in her pocket to achieve this. By 1968, when the Grand Duke had been spending like a sailor for a quarter of a century, this could not have been as easy as it was once, but she had bitten off the mouthful and she fully intended to chew it. I am happy to say I was on the list to be invited.

The inspiration for the party was the Duchess of Richmond's Ball, that famous 1815 gathering, given in Brussels on the very eve of Waterloo, and it was held at the Dorchester in Park Lane. Today, one thinks of the hotel as the haunt of film stars and merchants from the East, but in those days it played quite a major part in what was still referred to as 'Society.' On the night in question we came in, I think, by the ballroom entrance at the side, situated on Park Lane itself, and the theme of the evening was quite clear the moment one stepped inside, into that long, rather low, hall. Liveried footmen stood to attention, all modern signs, 'Exit' and the like, had been hidden behind greenery and there were candles everywhere. None of these last details would be legal today, of course, but nobody cared then. In truth, the party seemed to have taken over most of the ground floor of the hotel. It can't have, really, can it? But that's what it felt like on the night. Of course, we didn't arrive much before eleven, having eaten our dinners elsewhere, and the champagne that greeted us, held out by the whitewigged flunkeys, was not by any means the first drink of the evening. One has to remember that in the late 1960s, while nobody suggested that it was a good idea to drive a car when plastered, it was still long before such considerations had begun to shape our social life. 'Which of you is drinking tonight?' would have bewildered the couple arriving at a dinner, since the answer would invariably have been 'both.' For this reason no hostess scrupled to ask various friends to provide dinners for her guests before a ball.

Later in the Season, when more dances were given in the country, this would entail putting them up for the night, and essentially meant throwing a house party for strangers, who would drunkenly rattle around the countryside in their cars at all hours. But in London the thing was more easily managed. Sometimes you were flattered to receive an invitation to join the dinner provided by the parents of the deb of the evening, but this didn't happen (to me, anyway) all that often and usually a pleasant little postcard would drop through the letter box, saying that the writer believed you were going to the dance being given for So-and-So and she would be 'terribly pleased if you would dine here first.' At the end of which dinner, fairly far gone or at least merry, we would cheerfully climb into our vehicles and head off for the location of the party proper. This system had obvious advantages. The bonus for the young was that the dances went on forever, because they didn't really get going much before eleven. While the benefit for the old was plain economy. The parents of the girl in question usually had to hire the place, at least in London, and even in the country marquees would be expected unless the house was vast. Then there was the music, as well as a pretty good breakfast at the end of the event, but by adopting this system the hosts were spared the additional burden of dinner and wines for three or four hundred young and hungry people. No wonder the custom cheered the fathers up no end.

Having taken in the thoroughness of the arrangements, I made my way into the ballroom and here the illusion was impressive. At that time it was customary for a limited number of the older generation to be invited to these gatherings. They would be drawn from the god-parents of the debutante, as well as from the relatives and close friends of her parents, and as a rule they would fringe the proceedings, chatting in some other drawing room, watching the children dancing, occasionally venturing on to the floor to demonstrate an adapted foxtrot or quickstep, before retiring fairly early for the night. They were not expected to participate as full guests since, as we all know, the sight of dancing parents is torture for the young and always was. All this was especially true of costume parties, which are rather a bore for anyone out of their thirties, and the adults would simply arrive in evening dress, occasionally with some gay little gesture, worn as a brooch or a hair ornament. None of which applied to this particular event. I do not know if it was respect for the Grand Duchess or terror (probably the latter), but every single attendee, old and young, was in costume. As a particularly witty detail, or possibly after an instruction from on high, several of the mothers and fathers had deliberately chosen outfits of a slightly earlier date than those worn by their offspring. Men in wigs and ruffles, women in high-piled, powdered hair and beauty spots, from the 1780s or '90s, gave us all the sense that we were indeed back in the Regency and this was the older generation of the day, frowning and disapproving of modern youth. It always amuses me that this particular era, redolent as it is of Versailles and Queen Marie-Antoinette, is such a favourite costume theme with toffs. They seem to have forgotten that it did not as a whole turn out well for the privileged classes, so many of whom would leave their heads, and no doubt wigs, in the basket below the guillotine.

'What have you come as?' Lucy was dressed in a Jane Austen, white frock, high-waisted and pure, with a ribbon round her throat and her artificial ringlets sewn with tiny, white silk roses. She looked artful rather than innocent, but charming nonetheless.

'I'm a hussar,' I replied slightly indignantly, 'I should have thought it was obvious.'

'The trousers are wrong.'

'Thank you for that.' The trousers
were
wrong, as it happens, but the rest of the outfit was perfect, bright scarlet, heavily braided, with a fur-edged jacket slung between my left shoulder and my right armpit. I thought I looked fabulous. 'They're only wrong for 1815. They would be right by 1850. Anyway, it was the best I could manage. It was too late to find anything in London, so I had to raid the costume store of Windsor Rep.'

'It looks like it.' She stopped and stared round the room, which was beginning to fill up. 'Where was your dinner?'

'Chester Row. The Harington-Stanleys.'

'Any good?'

'Well, the food was like a shooting lunch that had been brought up to London in a rusty cake tin, but it was quite fun apart from that. What about you?'

She grimaced. 'Mrs Vitkov. With a group to meet her daughter, Terry. At that new French place in Lower Sloane Street.'

'The Gavroche?'

'That's it.'

'Lucky you.'

She gave me what used to be called an old-fashioned look. 'Have you met Terry Vitkov?'

'Not yet.'

'Don't.'

'Where are they from? The Balkans?'

'Cincinnati. And believe me, Miss Terry is a piece of work.' She stopped and nodded with a tight smile. 'Careful. That's her.' I turned to look. I could see at once that we needn't have worried and that Terry Vitkov was quite happy to be the subject of our discussion. She looked as if she were more than used to being the centre of attention. She was a good-looking girl. Indeed, she would have been very good-looking if it were not for a certain prominence of nose and chin, faintly suggesting a Man-in-the-Moon profile, which, combined with the intensity of her piercing and heavily made up eyes, gave her the air of a prisoner on the run, desperately searching the room for either an enemy or an escape route. Tonight she appeared to be dressed as a Regency courtesan, rather than a great-lady-from-times-gone-by, like every other woman there. Indeed, she was more or the less the only person in the ballroom, who would patently
not
have figured on the guest list of the real Duchess of Richmond. She walked up to us and we were introduced.