Partly, this was simply because it was funny: never before has a bulge in a pair of chinos been on the receiving end of so searching an analysis. But as I read Brown’s riff on the unfathomable appearance of this image in a toff family’s social record – “did she notice that something was awry, but decide to go ahead and paste the whole photograph in regardless – lock, stock and, as it were, barrel?” – I honked so loudly the man sitting next to me on the train dropped his sandwich. When people write of how this or that book made them laugh out loud, I’m suspicious even in the presence of Pooter or Jim Dixon and his madrigals, my hoots tend to be inward. It seemed that at the moment the camera’s shutter clicked, poor William had been struggling to contain a teenage erection. The “downward trajectory” of the fabric of his trousers was, his pal couldn’t help but notice, being “sent askew by a bluff diagonal”.
Beside her was Michael’s older brother, William, looking unremarkable save for one thing. Asked to sign the visitors’ book, Brown leafed nosily through it, at which point he discovered a photograph of Margaret, posing in the same hallway in which he stood, resplendent in a blue frock and fixed smile. It was in the hallway of their grandest place that the incident occurred. At school, he tells us, he had a friend called Michael, the second son of a lord and a nice, diffident chap to whose family houses – among them a castle in Yorkshire and a stately home in Norfolk – he was often invited to stay. He dishes up a Margaret-related encounter of his own. It is, he writes, like playing Where’s Wally? or a super snobby form of I-spy: everyone seems to have met this prickly and parenthetical figure at least once, from Kenneth Williams to Evelyn Waugh, Ken Tynan to Elizabeth Taylor – a fact all the weirder when you know that the same people were often frequently desperate to avoid her.īut perhaps Brown’s obsession has another, more – how to put this? – Freudian source. W hat on earth brought on Craig Brown’s intense interest in the Queen’s late sister, Princess Margaret? At the start of his naughty new book about her, he attributes it to Margaret’s Zelig-style appearance – ubiquitous, if not exactly chameleon-like – in just about every other memoir, biography and diary written in the second half of the 20th century.
0 kommentar(er)
