This memoir from 1963, Coronet Among the Weeds, is kind of crazy. It was written by Charlotte Bingham when she was only twenty looking back at her (and at twenty not so very far back) debutante years. Charlotte Bingham has had a rather long career as a very prolific novelist of mostly historical and romance novels along with work in television including the famous Upstairs Downstairs.
She comes from an illustrious family, and kind of a colorful one at that. Her father was a Baron (she is an "Honourable") and a secret MI5 member who happened to write detective novels and her mother was a playwright. They were a literary family and it sounds like Bingham's youth was filled with interesting escapades that she has written about in a series of memoirs. The third one MI5 and Me: A Coronet Among the Spooks has only just been released and it is that latter book that caught my eye and put me on to the first two.
I suspect the books can be read in any order, but I do like my books tidy so I am starting with the first. I have a feeling that it is not all that common for such a young woman (especially in the 60s) to not only have a memoir published but for it to be reviewed enthusiastically by not only the London Sunday Times but also The Times Literary Supplement, blurbs by both fill the entire back cover. The first paper notes that "the personality revealed in 150 burbling pages is droll, intelligent, and attractive." And as for the TLS calls the book "short, quick, genuinely funny." Who knows, maybe it helped to have a father and mother who were a Lord and Lady and whose family can be traced back to the year 1273!
In any case the book is very amusing and if you are looking for verisimilitude in your reading, you really can't beat a book about growing up as a deb in the London of the Swinging Sixties written by someone who lived it. If it was a movie I could picture the heroine narrating her story directly to the camera and then flashing back into the stories she relates--a little bit kooky and wry, charming but with a big splash of 1960s psychedelic color.
The book is written in a very breezy, chatty style as though she is telling you these stories face to face. As the London Sunday Times describes it--burbling! When Charlotte left school she went to Paris with a friend and stayed with a French family.
"As soon as I did speak a little French, I started to go to French dances, but I didn't have much success with Frenchmen as long as they knew I was English. They weren't keen on English girls. Luckily I didn't look very English, because I had one grandfather who was French, so the often got let in for something they hadn't bargained for. But they couldn't stand it for long. So I wrote myself a French dance-type conversation, timed it to last half an hour and learnt it off by heart. It turned out to be a jolly good thing. I'd just dance away quite happily having this conversation, then I'd change partners and start all over again. They all said what a marvellous accent I had and you'd never think I was English, and I'd tell them about this French grandfather of mine, and they'd say, ah, that explained everything. They even thought I was witty."
She cracks me up. This is definitely on the frothy and light side and the fun comes from the stories rather than the prose, but I am curious to see how the next two books compare.