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God Almighty, how Providence can smile! After leaving Canford a year early, I was free to accompany Mother to New York in the summer of 1961. 1961-’2 would be my gap year, thirty years before such things became fashionable. Money was tight, but Dad no longer had to find school fees. In New York, Mother’s sister, Lucy Mitton, … Read more
Dateline Canford School, September 1957: We paraded three-deep, facing John of Gaunt’s Kitchen. Our group, a “right shower” of first-term Canfordians, might have been extras in a Carry On film as we shambled into a platoon for our first Combined Cadet Force (CCF) parade. Earlier, Corporal Cousins had lined us up in the Armoury to hand out illfitting kit and boots. The … Read more
It’s a Sunday, an early summer day in the mid-1950s. I’m at boarding school in Salisbury. Dad had left the Navy and was working as an engineer for Fisons Ltd., near Cambridge. Occasionally my parents made the long drive to take me out for a picnic lunch. The school released me between Matins and Evensong, so we drove … Read more
SO, HERE COMES Salisbury Cathedral School, where I spent five more or less years of indentured servitude on scholarship, from 1952 to 1957. We choristers sang eight services and seven rehearsals a week in the Cathedral choir. While I was busily singing my way through my scholarship, the school and its occupants became an unwitting model for William … Read more
1947-’48: Dad’s posting shifted, from Royal Naval Air Station (R.N.A.S.) Culdrose in Cornwall, to R.N.A.S. Yeovilton, Somerset. We took a tiny white cottage among other tiny white cottages in the village of West Coker, a mile or so from Yeovilton. I must have been five. I recall little: womb-like warmth in the coal-fired kitchen stove; draughts and frigid rooms … Read more
I was working on something else when I stumbled on Eleanor, read part of her life, and was smitten. It wasn’t sufficient to write another biography along the lines of biographers Amy Kelly and Régine Pernoud. (Pernoud was born in the shadow of the Plantagenet’s treasure castle, the Chateau Chinon.) By definition, a biography written … Read more
It seems that ‘Power of a Woman’ is a big hit in the Czech language, with orders for books and requests that I write a new one along similar lines. This is great, but it’s tough to market several titles while writing another. If someone would only market my charming, imperious Eleanor of Aquitaine for me, … Read more
Getting locked into Salisbury Cathedral one night may have moved me to write “Power of a Woman” decades later. The experience was freezing, dark, vast, medieval, and animated by slight sounds amplified by echoes under vaulted stone. Then came morning, when the sun burst through the (former) eastern windows in the Lady Chapel, bringing mental … Read more
We have heard a lot about Eleanor of Aquitaine recently, but not from the lady herself. Until now! I should explain that. Years ago I stumbled on Eleanor of Aquitaine and became wildly impressed. Available biographies did not plumb her depth of character, so I decided to write her memoirs, eventually publishing in “her” voice, … Read more
“Why?” a young woman asked me. “Why did you choose to write about Eleanor? And why write her memoirs, rather than biography? Wasn’t it more difficult to write her memoirs?” “Yes,” I agreed. However, Eleanor of Aquitaine stands among those exceptional women whom history knows. I wrote her memoirs because I believed in reaching — … Read more