Page 54 Daily Mail, Friday, August 30, 2019
FRIDAY
BOOK OF
THE WEEK
NICK RENNISON
THE MOUNTBATTENS
by Andrew Lownie
(Blink £20, 400pp)Larking about in mud,
FOR years, Lara Maiklem has been a
devoted mudlark, a searcher in the
mud of the Thames foreshore.
Her early finds included ‘an empty
duffel bag, two scooters, an old lighter,
a shirt, a Wellington boot, headphones,
a submerged shopping trolley, a car
exhaust, a traffic cone, a mobile phone
and 14p in change’.
This doesn’t sound much more enticing
than a visit to the local tip, so why does
she persist in her hobby? Because, at
other times, she has found the most
extraordinary treasures — not always
valuable so much as hauntingly evocative
of past lives and lost loves...
Another reason why she has grown to
love the bleak Thames shoreline, she
explains, is that she was raised a farmer’s
daughter in The Weald and, after moving
to London, felt the need for wide-openspace. Stepping from some traffic-
choked street down forgotten steps
beside a bridge, or a rusting iron ladder
bolted to the massive Embankment
wall, she is transported to a world much
closer to nature. There, she is in a world
of cormorants and gulls and a thin
scattering of mudlarkers like herself.
What she finds most evocative are
things such as ‘prayers and curses,
Remembrance wreaths, single roses,
love letters, torn-up photographs’, not
to mention the tooth of a shark thatbecame extinct 3 million years ago. One
fellow mudlark even found ‘a large
uncut emerald’ — although, on the
whole, mudlarking isn’t much of a way
to get rich. For that, you’re probably
better off working in one of the many
investment banks nearby.
What mudlarking does give Maiklem
is a powerful sense of connection to
the past. There are stretches of the
Thames in Central London that contain
structures ancient beyond belief: at
low tide at Vauxhall, the river reveals a
row of wooden posts in the mud, ‘first
noticed by a mudlark in 1993’ and
subsequently dated ‘to the Middle
Bronze Age, approximately 1500 BC.’
People have been sailing and trading
on the river for millennia. Maiklem has
found several Roman coins, her first
being a small silver ‘siliqua’ from theCHRISTOPHER HART
MUDLARKING
by Lara Maiklem
(Bloomsbury £18.99, 336 pp)HISTORY
WHATBOOK..?
CECELIA
AHERN
Popular novelist
... are you reading now?
THE Chain by Adrian McKinty. It’s about
a mother whose teenage daughter is
kidnapped and, in order to save her, she
has to continue the chain by kidnapping
another child.
I like the premise — I think it’s clever —
and, unsurprisingly, the film rights have
been bought up.
I’ve just finished reading a novella by
Karin Slaughter and Lee Child entitled
Cleaning The Gold, a collaboration that
actually had me dancing.
These are two of my favourite authors,
I look forward to their novels every
year — one for my summer holiday, one
as my birthday present — so to read Jack
Reacher and Will Trent in the same story
blew my mind. I hope more authors do
this, I think it’s exciting.
... would you take
to a desert island?
THE Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey
Niffenegger is one of my favourite
novels. I read it 15 years ago and was
so moved by the writing and inspired
by its unique creativity. It combines
all the things I love about books: dark,
twisted, unique and moving.
It’s about a woman whose husband has
a rare genetic disorder that means his
body clock resets itself, causing him to
jump back and forth through time.
It is dark and deeply romantic and, while
it’s surreal, it feels real, thanks to the
grounded emotions and characters. It’s
beautifully written, with many layers and,
as their lives twist around each other,
from childhood to death, it means that
you can read it a few times and gain more
understanding. Probably just what you’d
need on a desert island.
... first gave you the reading bug?
AS A young child, I loved Enid Blyton’s The
Magic Faraway Tree, then moved on to
The Famous Five series. From the age of
ten, I was reading
Sweet Valley Twins,
Sweet Valley High by
Francine Pascal and
The Baby-Sitters Club
by Ann M. Martin.
As these series
of books were
numbered, I made it
my mission to work
my way through
them all, swapping
and sharing with a
group of friends. This fed my love
of books.
However, Under The Hawthorn Tree by
Marita Conlon-McKenna is the standout
book from my childhood — as it is for
many Irish schoolchildren. It touched me
deeper than any other book I’d read.
It’s the story of three children during
the Irish famine who are struggling to
survive and find their way to their
parents. It was a real eye-opener.
... left you cold?
AS MUCH as I admire Gillian Flynn and
have enjoyed all her books, I could have
thrown Gone Girl at the wall when I was
finished. I still recommend the book, as
there’s so much to admire and enjoy.
And, as much as Jane Austen’s fans will
hate me for this, I really can’t read her
novels. Her writing is simply not for me.
n POSTSCRIPT, the sequel to
PS, I Love You by Cecelia Ahern will
be published by HarperCollins
on September 19 at £20.T
heirs was the wedding
of the year in 1922. The
King and Queen were in
attendance. The Prince of
Wales was the best man.
The bridegroom, a great-grandson of
Queen Victoria, was Louis Mountbatten.
(The name had been changed during
World War i from Battenberg, which was
thought to be too Germanic.)
The bride was edwina Ashley, then one
of the richest heiresses in the world. her
family tree, as impressive as Mount-
batten’s, included the Native American
princess Pocahontas and the 19th-century
Prime Minister Lord Palmerston.
Mountbatten had first heard of his
bride-to-be from a friend who wrote to
him about ‘a new debutante whom all the
young men are mad about... huge blue
eyes, attractive hair, a gorgeous figure
and lovely legs; just your cup of tea.’
At the time, edwina was fending off the
attentions of other men. One Old etonian
Guards officer proposed. ‘she intended to
say yes, but at breakfast, she decided he
looked like a frog and changed her mind.’
When she met Mountbatten, the
attraction was swift and mutual. he
proposed on Valentine’s Day, four months
after their first meeting. Appropriately
enough, considering their future, they
were both travelling in india at the time.D
icKie, as Mountbatten was
known to friends and family,
was ‘happy beyond my wildest
dreams’. he wrote to edwina,
pledging undying love and praising bits of
her body he’d been allowed to see, including
her breasts, which he had dubbed, some-
what unromantically, Mutt and Jeff.
his delight continued after the wedding.
‘it’s marvellous... being married,’ he
confided to his mother.
however, as Andrew Lownie’s richly
entertaining biography of the Mount-
battens makes very clear, theirs was not
to be a conventional marriage.
‘edwina and i spent all our married
lives getting into other people’s beds,’
Dickie later confessed.
her roll-call of lovers is particularly
impressive. her first affair began in 1925,
although Dickie knew nothing of it for
months. eventually, the Prince of Wales
told him ‘a queer story about edwina’.
even then, Dickie refused to believe it,
but he was soon obliged to deal with his
wife’s serial infidelity. Amid rumours of
her affair with Douglas Fairbanks, the
Mountbattens talked of divorce, but agreed
to stay together in an open marriage.
scandalously for the time, several ofedwina’s amours were black. she may
have gone to bed with American singer
and actor Paul robeson. she certainly
had an affair with West indian enter-
tainer Leslie ‘hutch’ hutchinson, a
society favourite in the Thirties. One
(slightly improbable) rumour has it that
she and hutch once became so entangled
during their love-making they had to be
transported to hospital in an ambulance,
still clasped tightly together.
rather slower to break his marriage
vows, Dickie had his first affair in 1932with Yola Letellier, the much younger wife
of a French newspaper tycoon. But, during
the Thirties, it was edwina who set the
pace, regularly gadding off to china or
Brazil or the south seas with her lovers.
Lownie chronicles the Mountbattens
making their way in the 1920s and 1930s
through a world inhabited by people with
names such as Fruity Metcalfe and
Bunny Phillips, escapees from the pages
of P. G. Wodehouse. it’s sometimes
difficult to remember they were also at
the heart of some of the most significantWe spent our
OTHER
PEOPLE’S
BEDS!
MARRIED
LIFE
getting
into
They were the perfect couple.
But the Mountbattens each had
countless lovers, scandalising
the highest echelons of society