I got rid of her and there was a wonderful feeling of relief. No, because I was able to murder her in my novel A Haunting at Holkham. You feel that your governess, Miss Bonner, who tied you to your bed at night as a child, made you more vulnerable to a man like Colin Tennant. We’ve been able to talk about what Colin, their father, did to them in great detail and I’ve been able to say: “Oh, darlings.” Yes, but thanks to this book, I’ve had the most wonderful conversations with them. I do find it a bit strange what people complain about nowadays.īut isn’t stoicism a double-edged sword? As you admit in your book, life might have been better for you and your children if you’d talked more. I think anyone who lived through the war was marked for ever by it. Yes, they did and if the footman carried raw eggs in a bain-marie from the kitchen to the nursery, it was so far, they were boiled on arrival. Did the cooks at Holkham really gather up the shed velvet from deers’ antlers, fry it and serve it on toast? It is extraordinary to become a bestselling author at 87, your book translated into 12 languages. But the publication of Lady in Waiting made me braver. There was a great deal more that I wanted to say.

Why did you decide to write a second memoir? Now she has written another, Whatever Next?, in which she reveals that during her marriage she was a victim of domestic violence. Her first book, a memoir called Lady in Waiting, was published in 2019 and became a surprise hit. She was appointed lady in waiting to Princess Margaret in 1971. Her son Charlie, a former heroin addict, died of hepatitis in 1996. They had five children together, of whom three survive. She married Colin Tennant, later Lord Glenconner and the owner of Mustique, an island in the West Indies, in 1956. The eldest daughter of the 5th Earl of Leicester, she grew up at Holkham Hall in Norfolk and was a childhood friend of the late Queen and Princess Margaret and a maid of honour at the Queen’s coronation. A nne Glenconner was born Lady Anne Coke in 1932.

Lady anne glenconner new book