I have been fascinated by the Windsors from the age of 5 when, as the

precocious child of Sir Charles Higharn, the advertising tycoon and a mem-

ber of Parliament (who would die when I was 7 and who had marr ed

like Henry VIII, six times), I was brought from the nursery by my German

nanny to the enormous, ugly drawing room of The Mount, our family

home, to attend what I was informed was to be a momentous occasion.

The men were in black tie, wreathed in clouds of smoke from expensive

cigars; the women were in backless evening gowns, their shoulders van-

ishing in explosions of raffles.

The combination of perfume and tobacco smoke made me feel ill; the

decor of red, plush furniture and Chinese carpets swarming with dragons

and exotic birds made me feel even worse. I sat on the edge of a Victorian

chair, having been told that I must fix my attention on a speckled walnut

cabinet that stood under a gothic landscape paint ng The cabinet was

the family shrine: a radiogramophone.

Father turned on the switch, and everyone at last stopped talk ng. We

heard a voice announce the advent of the king I understood nothing of

what he said, in an American cockney voice adopted partly from his

ladylove and partly from a succession of nannies. (Some fifty years later,

1 discovered that the only language he spoke with a perfect modulation

was German.)

When the speech was over, the abdication speech which would be-

come one of the half-dozen most famous broadcasts in history, there was

a murmur of conversation I am told that my godfather, the best-selling

novelist Gilbert Frankau, broke into tears, that the staff was sobbing in

the background, and that more than one visiting European aristocrat had

mist on his monocle. I had no idea what "abdication" meant 1 was prob-

ably thinking about my pet goldfish,whether my father would continue

to keep me a kidnap victim (I had been snatched from Mother in a Silver