The Memoirs of Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester

"Yes, she lived to be nearly 103 and I went to see her a couple of times. She was very shy and wonderfully dry. When she spoke she always put an emphasis on the wrong word. She was a very attractive person. I reviewed the book when it came out. I just found myself laughing on every page. I was gripped and again it was this wry quality that attracted me. For example, she wrote about the Duke of Gloucester in Australia and how at one point I think he was at the dentist and a lot of people spotted him there. She wrote about how crowds gathered but “it did seem a rather unnecessary display of loyalty!” She also talks about how her maid went off for a walk in Ethiopia and found two figures on a gibbet and came back rather white-faced. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter But she also wrote very movingly. She lost her son Prince William in an air crash in 1972, which is pretty much the worst thing that can ever happen to a mother. And she adored him because he was the wild child. She wrote very touchingly in the book about that. By that stage the Duke had had a stroke and he couldn’t speak and she said, “I never knew whether to tell Prince Henry or not but I think he understood from watching the television,” and on her own reaction to her son’s death: “I have tried to persuade myself that it was better to have known him and lost him than never to have had him at all.” That surprised everyone! I think she was persuaded by her family that she had an interesting story to tell and as a widow and having lost her son she had a bit of time on her hands. She wrote this very charming book. Yes of course it is hard to be subjective. But they are putting their records down which have many very interesting things. I always thought a book ought to be written in which people took selections from people’s autobiographies when they skipped over things. For example, if someone says, “The war years were quiet years for me,” you might say – hello, actually they weren’t at all quiet. This chap was in [the British foreign intelligence service] MI6. I think with autobiographies sometimes it is really helpful to have somebody’s impression of their life and how they see the people they have met. I am a little bit suspicious of ghosted memoirs. I have just done this book about the Duchess of Windsor. Her memoirs were ghosted and the ghost actually said that the big problem was how to get rid of the first two husbands. The first one they turned into a sort of alcoholic, whom the Duchess rather warmed to, to the point where the ghost had to say to her, “Steady on, the readers are going to want to go drinking with this guy – he sounds like too much fun”. The second husband had to be made into a dull bore to explain why she had to get rid of him. So I am a little suspicious of ghosted memoirs but I think some memoirs are really beautifully written. Of course they cannot be subjective – how can we be about ourselves? But on the other hand they can be very interesting."