The scene is the drawing room at The Grove, near Wallingford; the pink and white palette ageing in a genteel manner, yet still as elegant as the day the room was created by Lady Pamela’s late husband, the interior designer David Hicks.
Seated on the grand sofa is Lady Pamela Hicks – Lady P for short – the younger daughter of Lord Mountbatten, as well as a bridesmaid and lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth II, her third cousin.
At 95 years of age, not only has her life spanned the 20th century’s most historic moments, she was present at many of them. Now, though, she is most content at home here in Oxfordshire amongst treasured family memories.
She proudly points out a wooden box on the occasional table, engraved with her mother’s name, Edwina Mountbatten, and given to her by British prisoners of war in Japan.
Above Lady P, the spotlight illuminating the large oil painting (George Romney’s portrait of Sir George and Lady Warren) is ever so slightly askew: “A fat swallow came in and sat on it,” explains Lady P. She, though, has not a single hair out of place.
This grand setting is not her usual spot. She favours the cosier sofa near the fireplace where she sits with her feet up on a chair amongst books and chocolate; she has The Inimitable Jeeves (“for the nostalgia”) and a box of Milk Tray on the go at the moment.
A no-fuss nonagenarian, there is mercifully no joyless health regimen: “It’s nursery food and chocolate,” states India Hicks, Lady P’s youngest daughter who, at 56, has clearly inherited her mother’s art for thwarting the ageing process.
There is always Battenberg cake in the house. “Mr Kipling, of course,” says Lady P. It was named in honour of an ancestor, before the Battenbergs became the Mountbattens. She’s still appalled about the time she went to the Ritz and Battenberg was misspelt on the menu.
This and other exquisite memories of a fading era fizz under the surface, and with India’s coaxing, bubble up with impeccable timing. Lady P’s has been an extraordinary life. Not that she would ever claim that herself. And so India has striven to record the details.
Lady Pamela is a visual biography and extraordinary chronicle of her life, featuring previously unseen photos and remarkable anecdotes, all lovingly assembled by India.
“I just wish she’d waited until I’d gone before publishing it,” says Lady P, brow furrowed.
“Try not to die before the photograph is taken,” teases India as she fixes a scarf around her mother’s neck.
Meanwhile, Lady P’s face forms a grimace of mock horror at the prospect of being strangled and jabbed with the pin of her brooch, the symbolic Star of India, given to Lady P by her father, in recognition of her work during his time as Viceroy.
“There we go, an instant neck lift,” pronounces India.
Humour, the darker the better, is a key value Lady P has sought to pass on. As is not sitting about talking about yourself, which doesn’t bode well for an interview: “One does get bored talking about oneself.” And yet, with India’s aid, here are her other rules for a long and elegant life.
Throughout this article, Lady Pamela Hicks has penned captions for certain photographs detailing her personal related memories and recollections. See the boxes under these pictures for her jottings.
First and foremost, duty and service
The Hickses have lived a life of undeniable privilege, but with that has come responsibility. “You were never to swan around,” says India, of her grandparents’ attitude towards their own remarkable good fortune. Lady P was made to work from the age of 17 onwards, and because they didn’t have a need for the money, she was not to accept any. She was, however, expected to pay her parents rent. ‘Of those to whom much is given, much is expected’: it was understood.
Work was a source of happiness for Lady P. “You got such satisfaction out of completing your duty and doing service. Those are two words you don’t hear any more,” she says. “We’ve lost our sense of duty and service. Now it’s just me, me, me. I get very impatient with it. What satisfaction do they get besides instant pleasure? That’s not going to last.”
Lady P not only learnt her sense of duty from her parents, but also from the late Queen: “She was absolutely rigid in her dedication to duty.” Her own devotion to duty was tested when she was asked to be the late Queen’s lady-in-waiting on the six-month long Commonwealth Tour in 1953 and 1954.
After a fragmented few years in India, where her father had overseen partition (“His mother told him not to go, that it was a poisoned chalice,” says India), and Malta, Lady P was reluctant. Duty, however, is duty. Along with them went the Queen’s coronation dress. “I was very jealous of that dress,” says Lady P. “It had a bigger cabin than I did.”]
By the end of the tour Prince Philip was waving in his sleep. “But we did have fun. We were coming back from a dinner in Melbourne and passed a drunk clinging to a lamp post. Prince Philip waved at him – and his face as he considered whether he dared let go of the lamppost and wave back!”
Family and loyalty
To say Lady P’s upbringing was extraordinary would be an understatement. She and her older sister Patricia were once misplaced in a Hungarian hotel by their mother for six months. She had cousins who couldn’t recognise their mothers when they were brought down to say good night.
“I could tell my mother by the sound of her charm bracelet as she came up the stairs.”
She was mainly raised by her nanny, of whom she was extremely fond. “My mother got rid of her because I adored her a bit too much.”
While resilience isn’t the sort of word Lady P would use, that was the childhood hallmark.
“My father used to come upstairs every night and read to us in bed. My mother stopped it. My father had not an iota of jealousy in him, but my mother was riddled with it.”
India has always been quite shocked by her grandmother’s behaviour as a mother. Yet Lady P has had remarkable capacity to look beyond that and has always been admiring of her mother as a person; in particular for her work in India and beyond.
“Refugees would be promised things by ministers, who would then leave and do nothing. When my mother asked what they needed, it happened,” she says.
India sums it up with diplomacy: “She wasn’t a good mother but she was an extraordinary person.” And in spite of this, for Lady P, family means everything. “Those closest to you are the most important. And to be loyal to them. To know you can really rely on someone is very important.”
Be curious
When India was growing up, this is what Lady P would emphasise the most. “It’s not a word we hear an awful lot any more, but you always said that a curious mind is the secret to a broader life,” she says.
It is closely linked to the idea of not being wrapped up in oneself; that it is necessary to look beyond yourself to a wider life: “Now everyone only thinks of themself,” says Lady P.
Humility and open-mindedness were essential in the aftermath of unimaginable family tragedy, when Earl Mounbatten was assassinated, and other family and friends killed and injured by an IRA bomb aboard their boat. “After the bomb that killed my father and nephew, every day was a day gained. Every day would be new things. I appreciated that there might never be another day,” says Lady P.
In grief, fortitude
In her tenth decade, Lady P has many friends who have gone, a husband and also close family. How does Lady P handle grief? “Be grateful you knew them and had a chance to love them. Be happy you have the memories of them but look forward, don’t look back,” she says.
Her favoured motto is: “Turn your face to the sun and the shadows fall behind you.”
That is not to say one should be unfeeling. When Lady P’s nephew Timothy Knatchbull was researching his book From A Clear Blue Sky, he interviewed the policeman who had driven Lady P to the hospital. He recounted how she was completely stoical in the car and then suddenly dissolved into pieces. Arriving at the hospital she dried her eyes, put on her sunglasses and said to him: “Sometimes it’s good to cry.”
That extraordinary ability to pull oneself together stayed with the policeman for 40 years.
Of the days that followed, Lady P recalls: “The only way to live through the bomb was to talk about it. Any new person who hadn’t been bored about it already, I would talk it out to them.”
On the way to Romsey to bury Lord Mountbatten the Queen sent for Lady P to come to her compartment at the front of the train and said: “Now tell me everything that happened.”
Lady P says: “She adored my father. She needed to know.”
A sense of humour
After such tragedy, few would find reason to laugh again, but that wasn’t the Mountbatten way.
Typical of the family’s love of humour, the darker the better, Patricia Knatchbull (the 2nd Countess Mountbatten of Burma) called the scarring from the bomb her ‘IRA facelift’.
She took her sense of humour from her father, Lord Mountbatten.
Addressing 500 boys of the Dragon School in 1977, among them his youngest grandsons Ashley, Nicholas and Timothy, Lord Mountbatten said: ‘I well remember being your age. At school, Lockers Park, in my boarding house.
“On the first evening we all went up to the second floor and had a competition to see who could lean farthest over the bannisters. I won. When they picked me up off the ground floor I had surprisingly few injuries.’
A sense of humour, and a sense of fun. India remembers being told as a child to look at what her grandfather was doing, and then not to do it. His table manners in particular. “He would pour his honey by pulling his spoon up to a great height,” says India.
Lady P chimes in: “He would say: ‘I eat my peas with honey. It makes the peas taste funny, but it keeps them on the knife’.”
The late Queen wasn’t without a wicked wit. Picnicking on a beach on the Commonwealth Tour, the royal party was asked if they’d seen the Queen: “She stood up and said: “Yes, they went thatta way!”.
Mind your manners
“Manners maketh man”: says Lady P gnomically. Her reasoning being that they make everyone so much more comfortable. Rudeness, meanwhile, just upsets everyone. “It’s so simple and obvious, but hard to do,” says India.
“When I’m going through an airport and the security are rude, I often want to talk back, but then I think, what would my mother do?” Some elements of the finer points of good manners have been lost through the years.
Lady P recalls how a chap who went to have lunch with the Queen and afterwards asked, ‘Shall I thank?’ To which the equerry said, ‘Yes, it would be rather nice’.
“He sent her a postcard,” says Lady P, whose face crumples into laughter at the memory.
“Most people wouldn’t understand why that’s funny,” says India.
He should have seen a two page letter of thanks. “All these years later, and she’s still laughing about the postcard,” says India.
Never be late
Again, this is about manners. If you are late, that reason better be a good one.
“In my youth there was a song, ‘Miss Otis Regrets’,” In the Cole Porter ditty, the reason Miss Otis is unable to make her luncheon engagement gradually becomes clear. After a pause, Lady P explains: “She died.” Her wider gripe is about how we live our lives today, frantically. “Her generation did not live frantic lives,” says India. “It was all calm and on time.”
Follow etiquette when hosting
After the death of their mother, Lady P and her sister would often help Lord Mountbatten host weekend parties or lunch parties at which the royalty of Europe would be present: “It was fun having Princess Grace to stay, all we did was look at her, of course,” recalls Lady P.
The success of a party depended on etiquette; the perfect seating plan, sitting next to someone interesting, putting people in the right rooms; in order of seniority.
While etiquette might seem stuffy, Lady P believes the reverse can result in unhappy guests.
Indira Gandhi once decided to seat diplomats and their wives on the basis of shared language, rather than rank, in order to facilitate better conversation.
“She thought it was the sensible thing to do. When my mother got back to England she couldn’t resist calling to see how her experiment in ignoring etiquette was going. She said that the French man had turned his plate over, which means ‘I protest’. Because he’d been put at the furthest point of the table.”
Make guests feel comfortable, no matter the circumstances
In the late 1990s, David Hicks, Lady P’s late husband, told two American ladies of his acquaintance that they simply must visit the gardens at The Grove when they were next in England. And so they duly called and arranged to come.
After taking an expensive car from Claridges, they arrived. Lady P answered the door and told them, ‘Oh, you’re just too late’. To which they replied, ‘We’re so sorry, he said to come at 11am’.
“No, no,” replied Lady P. “He died in the night.’
When the ladies made their apologies and made to leave, Lady P insisted they stay for a cup of tea.
“So these poor shocked Americans were sitting here and you’re trying to make small talk,” says India, still in disbelief 25 years later. “The undertakers arrived and they could see my father being bounced down the stairs,”
Why did Lady P feel she must entertain? “Well, they’d come a long way”.
Dress appropriately
Lipstick, pearls, handbag; the triumvirate in Lady P’s wardrobe. Does she really always wear lipstick? “Of course. You disappear without your lipstick.”
In years gone by she would have also always had a powder compact with her. “Now I don’t, so I’m all shiny. But apparently everyone’s shiny nowadays,” she says, not looking the least shiny.
“And you always spritz yourself with fragrance don’t you?” says India. “We call it scent, not perfume. Very common to call it perfume,” interjects Lady P.
Her mother wore Guerlain, and Lady P recalls being given lots of Chanel. “So I wanted to use them. My mother said, “Use any that you like, but not Number 5. That’s the tart’s scent’.”
Her Tusting handbag, a gift from India for her 92nd birthday, yields a lipstick, a pocket diary, a packet of tissues, an India-Hicks-designed card holder, a change purse, “which is more than 70 years old,” says India. “But no bonnet,” she adds incredulously.
It is no secret that the late Queen favoured plastic bonnets. As does Lady P. “Only when it’s raining. Papa initiated them because when it started to rain we would say: ‘Oh, we can’t ride today’. He was so fed up with it that he went and bought these plastic bonnets so there were no excuses.”
Her iconic blow-dry was her husband’s suggestion. “He said to me, ‘’You have quite a big face, so it’s essential you have bigger hair’.” She has never changed her style. “Well if David Hicks designs something, you keep it,” quips India. Vanity isn’t a consideration. Rather, Lady P says: “It’s instinctive to try and be neat. To be appropriate.”
The same sense of propriety saw her wear mourning for a month after the late Queen died, despite the fact she was mostly at home at The Grove. Lady P has never worn jeans, unlike Queen Camilla. However she does approve of some changes. Her favourite? “Not having to change.”
For dinner, that is. On the Commonwealth Tour they changed four times a day, and had four different types of gloves. “It was such a waste of time.” Undoubtedly there are still certain households where they still do, but Lady P won’t be visiting them.
Take exercise, but not too seriously
In her youth, Lady P would ride every day for two hours and then walk a dog for an hour in the afternoon. “I last rode in my 70s,” she says. She is still made to walk up and down the hallway every afternoon. Although she isn’t impressed by the idea of forced exercise.
“I’ve never been to a gym in my life. When I’m with India she is always frantically trying to see if she can find a gym in a hotel,” she says disdainfully. Exercising her mind, however, is a must. Lady P has always loved reading. The latest William Boyd sits on her coffee table, alongside books written by her children and grandchildren. She is currently reading an Elizabeth Taylor novel, along with Wodehouse.
“You can tell the mood of the day, whether it’s a day we want to die or a day where we want to live, by the book,” jokes India. “If she’s got Daphne du Maurier out it’s bad. If it’s Edith Wharton, even worse.”
Look at the world through others’ eyes
“In India I quickly appreciated the way I had been brought up, without prejudice or suspicion of any other religious group,” recalls Lady P. She treasures the friendship that she had with Gandhi and recalls witnessing the power of his peaceful approach while sitting next to him at a prayer meeting of 800,000 people. “Not one person was looking away. They were all concentrating on him.”
His words stay with her now: “Religion is one tree with many branches”. Her mother, Lady Edwina, meanwhile, always sought to get to the heart of a person. “When asked once whether a certain gentleman she had met on her travels was black or white? She had not noticed,” say India. “She had only seen the character of the person. It wasn’t important to her whether they were black or white.”
Understanding people, regardless of differences in religion or politics, is a value that Lady P has inherited; be it the people in the same room as her or migrants coming to the country.
And finally, a sense of adventure
Lady P saw the world on the Queen Elizabeth 2 ocean liner, the QE2. Today, while there are days where she feels she has seen and done enough, there are others where she tears up to London, most recently with India to see Kiss Me Kate at the Barbican.
“We need to go to Charbonnel to fill up my box,” exclaims Lady P. The late Queen’s favourite chocolatier, Charbonnel et Walker, has bestowed on Lady P a lifetime’s supply of chocolates. The best of all possible reasons to continue to enjoy a long and elegant life.
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