The Final Curtsey (4 page)

Clara Knight, first my nanny and then nanny to the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret

Many people now will probably think that allowing your child to be brought up by a nanny is an abdication of maternal responsibility, but I would argue that teaching the early lessons of
childhood to reluctant offspring are rarely achieved without pain by the present generation of busy and impatient mothers. I was certainly grateful, as a mother of four, to have a proper working
nursery, although my children did manage to pull a few tricks. My younger daughter, Victoria, was particularly adept at fooling nanny. During potty training she once substituted what should have
been in the bottom of the pot with small fir cones. Nanny was taken in and she was allowed out to play.

Granny Strathmore

Lord and Lady Strathmore, my grandparents

On her father’s side my mother was descended from the family of King Robert the Bruce, and as legend has it, from Macbeth, who was a much better King of Scots than Shakespeare gave him
credit for. Another Strathmore ancestor was Janet, the widow of the 6th Lord Glamis, who was burned alive as a witch on the castle hill of Edinburgh ‘in the prime of her years and of singular
beauty’. My maternal grandmother, Nina Cecilia Cavendish-Bentinck, was the great granddaughter of the 3rd Duke of Portland, who was twice Prime Minister in the reign of King George III. Had
she been a son she would have succeeded as Duke. My grandmother also counted among her forbears King Henry VIII’s favourite sister, Mary Tudor, widow of King Louis XII of France, and that
ill-fated teenage dupe, Lady Jane Grey, ‘the nine days Queen’, who was beheaded on the orders of Queen Mary — Bloody Mary — the legitimate heir to her brother, King Edward
VI.

Carberry was set in unremarkable countryside, but it took at least two hours to walk around the perimeter of the estate, and inside we were in our own little world. In the winter we skated and
played ice hockey on the pond, which, in my view didn’t quite qualify as a lake. There was also a hill called Mary’s Mount, because it was exactly where Mary, Queen of Scots surrendered
to the Confederate Lords and began her long trail to the scaffold, via plots and counter plots, at Fotheringay. It was from there too, that Bothwell, her third husband, fled, later dying quite mad
in a dank prison cell in a Danish castle. There is a stone monument on top of the hill commemorating Mary’s capture.

The house was built around a square fourteenth-century keep and had large additions. The front hall was the ground floor of the keep and had a huge fireplace. Off that were the billiard room and
the gents’ loo. A passage led to the garden hall with a door into the sunken garden. My father had a smoking room nearby, and one flight up was the drawing room, a big L-shaped chamber with
three elegant Adam mantelpieces; the north and south libraries and the dining room. Another staircase led to the armoury, the first floor of the original castle. The walls were covered with weapons
of every kind and in a tiny anteroom was the supposed entrance to a tunnel used as an escape route in time of danger. As a child I found this rather scary, yet definitely exciting, though I would
try to avoid ever entering it alone.

There were ten spare bedrooms for guests; my parents’ bedroom and dressing room; a bedroom each for us children, and tucked away, staff bedrooms. The servants had their own upstairs and
downstairs regime, as always happened in the big houses of the day. At the top of the pile were the butler and the housekeeper, who was entitled to double deference because her sister was the
housekeeper at Buckingham Palace; the cook, and my mother’s personal maid. These last three ladies were given the honorific of ‘Mrs’, regardless of their marital status. If the
feminist movement had been in existence then, I do not doubt that they would have a word or two to say about that. Equally I can imagine the formidable ladies concerned rising up in horror if
anyone had addressed them as ‘Ms’.

In addition there were three housemaids, a footman, a kitchen maid, a scullery maid, a house boy; the ‘odd man’, who did the jobs no one else wanted to do, as well as a relic of a
bygone age called the ‘Still room’ maid, who had her own kitchen. She was the last of several generations of such ladies and her job description was something of an enigma. One of her
tasks was to make the porridge, which she did in the old-fashioned Scots way involving a whole night’s brewing. The male members of the family always had porridge for breakfast from wooden
bowls, while standing up, an ancient Scottish habit dating back to the times of Clan warfare. She would also make the jam, and bottle the fruit. She was very old when I knew her and always had a
drip on the end of her nose. I used to whistle a lot in those days and when she caught me at it she would shriek: ‘Whistling maids and cawing hens are fit for neither man nor beast.’
The butler, Mr Fox, was at the top of this feudal domestic pyramid and was almost like a family member, being allowed to reprimand us children for any infringement of the rules. He supervised the
laying of the dining table, chose the wines; greeted visitors at the front door and served as valet for my father. His first job in the morning was to serve my father with early morning tea,
together with small thin buttered slices of white bread. A full Scottish breakfast followed.

My father depicted as ‘Carberry Tower’ in
Vanity Fair

The fire regulations for Carberry Tower

Me with the family Labrador, Glen, at Carberry