Daughter of Empire: My Life as a Mountbatten

In season four of Downton Abbey, Dame Maggie had the pitch-perfect line, "If I were to search for logic, I would not look for it in the English upper class." Lady Pamela Hicks's Daughter of Empire: My Life as a Mountbatten lends credence to that advice. Pamela's parents, the reader learns in the opening pages, each have lovers who live with the family and take delight in presenting their young daughters with such pets as wallabies, lions, and bears. Her experiences are light years from anything most readers will have experienced: her father, one of Queen Victoria's grandsons, was the last viceroy of India and Lady Pamela herself was one of Queen Elizabeth's bridesmaids - and later served as lady-in-waiting on her tour through the Commonwealth.

As is often the case with memoirs, the book becomes richer and more engaging as the author ages and the memories become clearer and more meaningful. The earliest chapters of Daughter of Empire are the least interesting, except in terms of voyeurism, as I've already mentioned. It begins to gain steam as World War II breaks out and Pamela and her older sister Patricia are sent to New York City, where they live as guests of Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt. The war also has the affect of making Pamela's mother, the heiress Edwina Ashley, into a serious person, who becomes much more sympathetic and likeable. 

It is the post-war years, though, that are the meat of this memoir. These are the years when the Earl of Mountbatten serves as viceroy and Pamela finds herself in the whirl of history, with Gandhi making regular appearances, for example. These are also the years when Princess Elizabeth marries Pamela's cousin, Philip, when Pamela accompanies the young couple on a tour of Africa, during which Princess Elizabeth becomes Queen Elizabeth, and then when Pamela serves as lady-in-waiting on a the round-the-world royal tour that begins in the Caribbean and ends in Gibraltar. 

Ultimately, I enjoyed this peek into the last years of the great Empire. In that sense, it is similar to Elizabeth the Queen, only much shorter. I wished the epilogue had mentioned the most famous - and most tragic - episode in the Mountbatten family, that of the assassination of Lord Mountbatten and other members of the family by the IRA in 1979. This a very minor quibble, though, and one that is easily overlooked.