Kiss Myself Goodbye: The Many Lives of Aunt Munca

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After all that childhood conditioning about perfection, no wonder what seemed like a miraculous recovery to her friends was nothing of the sort to her. Interesting how easy it was to get divorced in the first half of the 20th century (if you didn't care about your reputation), and how when you got married there was no requirement to prove you were who you said you were. that lets Georgie live a little further and happier, after she distanced herself from her family, including Ferdinand. But in truth, the book is far more clever and modish even than that suggests, and not only because it opens with a scene in which one of its characters goes champing (camping in a church, in case you’re not up to speed).

stars for me purely because there is far too much detail, far too many names to keep track of and hence it’s taken me an age to read.While the last thing survivors need is more blame, our society supports a narrative that blames the objectively innocent party because the blatantly guilty party has spent their entire lives fabricating a persona and we’re just being human, and human psychology is quite counterintuitive especially in the context of trauma. The woman formally known as Eileen Constance Sylvia McDuff, or Patricia Elizabeth Baring, or Mrs G R Mount – whose age could only be guessed at – is thoroughly modern. After many false leads and dead ends, Mount finally pieces the story together: Buster Baring was married and divorced seven times, before dying in his 50s; his marriage certificates variously describe him as an electrical engineer, ­professional dancer, Grand Prix driver, manager of a joinery and cabinet works, timber merchant, farmer, author, and man “of independent means”. At one point Mount tells us he has on his desk evidence enough “to send Munca down for the maximum of seven years, as prescribed under Section 57 of the Offences Against the Person Act of 1861”. Romances with Max Hastings, Christopher Bland (later chairman of the BBC) and Norman Lamont are similarly vetoed.

Mount, a former editor of the TLS, is an old Etonian, a cousin of David Cameron and in the 1980s ran the No 10 policy unit under Mrs Thatcher. My bookshelves groan with her presents, accumulated since my childhood, including a full set of Samuel Pepys‘ diaries.Despite all Aunt Munca's (manifold) flaws, Mount is able to also cite good points about her and how she was a product of her circumstances and time (to a certain extent). The lies spread and engulf all around her, causing great damage to some and just inconvenience to others. Only now, many of those whose job it used to be to look beyond the smoke and mirrors are also embroiled in it: “A number of good journalists have gone into these mega PR firms to work as data-miners and that sort of thing.

I listened to the audio version of this book, which was 'jolly good' as the reader gives a very upper class, public schoolboy British touch giving it wonderful dramatics and dry humor to the words. The second thing was the mention of Sheffield and there is a fabulous lengthy chapter in the book about my home city in the late 19th and early 20th century. How did Munca win the commission in the late 1930s to arrange the multi-million interior decor of Charters, the sky-high expensive country house, the last ever to be built in England? While Georgie’s adoption was the first of the Mounts’ deceptions to surface, it was merely one of an intergenerational network of falsehoods spun by Munca and then given succour by Greig.

The idea that Greig was a heterosexual gripped just once, and only once, by a momentary and inexplicable gay compulsion, is far less plausible. When two people telephoned me to say they’d noticed the same thing, I realised my reaction wasn’t just down to bruised ego and pettiness.

But sometimes, she would annoy you into being a bit braver, and you’d say: ‘Well, I really wonder if that is true, prime minister. M aking Nice will be published at the same time as the paperback of another book by Mount, Kiss Myself Goodbye .The clear statement of lovelessness in their will was perhaps the first instance of the Mounts not lying to Georgie.