Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter, Diana Souhami [the ebook reader TXT] 📗

the King’s dull routine. ‘We are his servants quite as much as the housemaid or the butler,’ she wrote. And Violet when older derided Biarritz as ‘the most callous and trivial of French watering places’.

On Easter Sunday they all wore new clothes and in the morning gave presents. Sonia particularly liked the

lovely little jewelled Easter eggs given by Kingy and Sir Ernest, particularly an exquisitely midget one in royal blue enamel, embossed with a diamond ‘E’ and topped by a tiny crown in gold and rubies.

In the afternoon in a convoy of cars they went for an elaborate picnic. Caesar sat on Violet’s knee. In Triple Violette she said she secretly detested the dog, which smelled. Kingy chose the site – usually by the side of the road. Footmen set out lunch: a long table, linen cloths, chairs, china plates, silver cutlery, all sorts of cold food in silver bowls.

The King’s cigars and cigarettes were not good for his health. Temper or laughter made him cough uncontrollably. In 1905 he had a swelling in his throat which his doctors feared ‘might develop any time into cancer’. He sprayed it twice a day. One year on a day when Mrs Keppel visited Bayonne without him, Violet persuaded him to take her to a carnival at San Sebastiàn. There were crowds. He had a bronchial attack, went scarlet in the face, appeared to be suffocating, and was rushed back to Biarritz by his chauffeur:

Mama was waiting for us on the villa steps and I was sent straight to my room. As for the poor King, it was decidedly the last time that he gave in to one of my childish whims.

The King and Mrs Keppel were at Biarritz in spring 1908 when Campbell-Bannerman resigned as Prime Minister because of illness and Asquith was elected. Bertie wrote to his Private Secretary, ‘C-B was a great gentleman and poor Asquith is so deplorably common not to say vulgar!’ Common or not, the Constitution required the King to swear in the new leader, preside over the Privy Council meeting, the delivering of Seals of Office, the ‘kissing of hands’.

Bertie did not want to break his holiday with Mrs Keppel. He told his equerry to ‘sound Asquith’ and see if he would travel to Biarritz for the ritual kissing. There was criticism in the press and consternation in parliament. Mrs Keppel used her influence to defuse alarm. Bertie’s equerry, Sir Arthur Davidson, told Knollys:

Mrs George Keppel told me last night that when motoring with the King in the afternoon she said something casually with reference to C-B and asked if his death would make any alterations to his plans. He said he could not say, but he meant to do whatever the future Prime Minister suggested.

Asquith caught the boat train from Victoria Station on 6 May 1908 and reached Biarritz next evening. Mrs Keppel briefed him on how to behave. He saw the King on the morning of the 8th then wrote to his wife Margot:

I put on a frock coat and escorted by Fritz and old Stanley Clarke went to the King who was similarly attired. I presented him with a written resignation of the office of Chancellor of the Exchequeur; and he then said ‘I appoint you Prime Minister and First Lord of the Treasury’ whereupon I knelt down and kissed his hand. Voilá tout! He then asked me to come into the next room and breakfast with him. We were quite alone for an hour and I went over all the appointments with him. He made no objection to any of them and discussed the various men very freely and with a good deal of shrewdness.

Acknowledging the status of Mrs Keppel, the following day, on 9 May, Asquith wrote to her, too, on Hôtel du Palais stationery:

Before leaving Biarritz I must send you a line of most sincere thanks for your kind words and wise counsels, which I shall treasure and (I hope) profit by.

It was a real pleasure to see you at such a time, and to be made to feel that, whatever betides, I can count on your friendship.

The King and the Keppels returned from their Biarritz holidays via Paris. Little Mrs George stayed a week or so in Cassel’s apartment at 2 rue du Cirque to visit Worth for her dresses and the rue St Honoré for gloves and shoes. Violet saw her mother received ‘like a goddess’:

Monsieur Jean (Worth) supervising her fitting in person, the vendeuses quite shamelessly forsaking their other clients to vie with each other in flattering epithets … My mother was everything that could appeal to them, lovely, vivacious, fêted, fashionable, with a kind word for each of the anonymous old crones who had been for years in the establishment … Even I came in for a little vicarious petting. De Madame Keppel, je suis la fille, je suis la fille, I chanted.

It was an unusual chant for a child and from it problems flowed, entrenching her view of herself as less lovely, less deserving of attention or praise.

Violet preferred summers at Duntreath to Easters in Biarritz. Her mother’s ancestral castle seemed more apt, more romantic than the Villa Eugénie or Portman Square. ‘Every year I find it unchanged,’ Violet wrote with majestic imagery when she was sixteen,

the same stone for stone as it was 500 years ago … the peacocks stalking round the house in the small hours of the morning uttering penetrating but unmusical cries … the gorgeous flaming sunsets that set the hills a-kindling for all the world like cabochon rubies … the haunted room and the Dumb Laird behind the dining room screen … the purposeless, incessant tick-tick of pigeon feet upon the roof and the jackdaws flying from turret to turret.

On 1 September every year she and Sonia travelled there by train: Carlisle, Glasgow, Blanefield. In early childhood a wagon and roan horses took them, by night, the last stretch of the journey. When Bertie visited to shoot grouse in the heather all was displaced. For a