Kiss Myself Goodbye is Ferdinand Mount's account of his aunt's life. A shadowy character, edging around questions she doesn't want to provide true answers to, he manages to discover endless amazing things about her life both up until the point she is a part of his life and beyond. And it truly is fascinating. The whole thing had my jaw dropping on many occasions, and sometimes nodding along sagely as previously unknown or seemingly unconnected pieces of information all slotted into place. It is definitely a book for Anglophiles and ancestry bluffs. Although a bit tedious, the author, Ferdinand Mount, turns what otherwise would be a boring set of facts, into a bit of humor and wit.

What Georgie had gone through had a terrible impact on her development but, like so many traumatised people, she’d found a way to transcend it. And the more she sought distance from the Mounts, the more she became herself. Because she was forced to act throughout her upbringing, some of Georgie’s natural, spontaneous reactions had disappeared. She had to make a kind of snorting noise to signify laughter. Her real laugh rarely surfaced. This was an affliction I could recognise. There's such a feeling of love from the author to his family - regardless if they are biological or otherwise, this marks the author out as someone who has taken a huge amount of thought as to how and why this book needs to be written. This is an amazing shaggy dog story in which he attempts to discover the truth about the life of his aunt who aunt who weaved a web of obfuscation and confusion. Also on the shelves is a photograph of Georgie at about eight years old. She does look haunted. None of the gaiety, confidence, or spontaneity of childhood is apparent. Instead, her expression seems to ask: ‘Am I doing this right?’ Her hair has been glossed into perfect, golden ringlets more appropriate for a Moulin Rouge attraction than a child. There was nothing wrong with her original nose. Why on earth did Munca arrange that operation, saddling Georgie with an implausible story about falling over, which she had to recite if anyone recognised the tell-tale, too-perfect symmetry of the nose-job. Fortunately, before their friendship broke down, my father photographed Georgie across four decades — images that show her at her happiest. To quote Sir Walter Scott "Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive!" This book is a delicious account of how a family has risen in society, whilst all the time not ever being true to its roots due to the tangled web of lies and deceit.

Ferdinand Mount’s Aunt Betty, or Aunt Munca as she wanted him to call her, was married to his father’s brother, Greig, who was accordingly known as Unca. The names Unca and Munca were lifted from Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Two Bad Mice: Hunca Munca, who lives beneath the floorboards, vandalises a doll’s house when she discovers that the delicious looking food on the plates is made of plaster. Extraordinary ... shed[s] a brilliant light on the strangeness of people's lives, the need for disguise and masquerade, the shame that drives people to act in the most peculiar ways, the ghosts that reside, unburied, within us. * Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday * We are better now, aren’t we? Yes, I think we are. Our private lives are our own. There are no public pressures not to follow our desires. In fact, there are laws and codes of practice now to protect those desires from insult or obloquy. Deviancy is a thing of the past, because there is no sexual orthodoxy to deviate from. And you would need a stony heart not to welcome most of this. Stigmas belong on flowers and not on human beings. We find it difficult to imagine…how society could have been so harsh or unforgiving.” This is a nice attitude, but it requires context: Mount was deeply embedded in the very government that considered re-criminalising homosexuality and introduced Section 28, which consigned a generation of young LGBT people to unnecessary torment, unable to seek counsel or support or help. It was the very same government that took enormous trouble to re-stigmatise parenthood outside marriage, reserving its harshest criticisms for single mothers rather than fathers. The idea that such cruelties now lie beyond his imagination is, for me, a suspension of disbelief too far.

When I was 21, I came out to her by letter. I was terrified. I had been deeply wounded by being outed at school, twice. I was part of the Section 28 generation, unable to go to any authority figure with my worries about being gay in a country that openly hated gay people. Under Margaret Thatcher, the gay liberation gains made in the ’70s were gradually reversed, to the point where the government and the newspapers that supported it were starting to agitate for the re-criminalisation of homosexuality. After I was outed at 16, with disastrous consequences, every self-preserving fibre in me rallied and I ‘inned’ myself permanently so as to survive. Not only do I believe her account, but it makes more sense. The idea that Greig was a heterosexual gripped just once, and only once, by a momentary and inexplicable gay compulsion, is far less plausible. Perhaps he sought ‘reparative therapy’ in his marriage to Munca. Who knows? But it’s more likely that he was trying to conceal his sexuality than to change it. He and Munca certainly entertained large numbers of gay friends, including Liberace. Munca, who clearly thrived on intrigues and pretences, may well have been delighted to enter into a cooked-up marriage. With her proud head and hooded eyes she does indeed look, Mount thinks, like a squaw. Unca’s money comes from his firm, Lennard’s Shoes, which is a notch below Dolcis and a notch above Freeman, Hardy and Willis. Munca has breeding as well as brass: her entry in Debrett’s Baronetage describes her as “dau. of late John Anthony Baring of New York”, which is curious because she has no trace of an American accent and never once mentions her illustrious father. The anomalies in her story are noted by young Mount, who will remember her once telling him that her mother had been a lady’s maid.In Cold Cream , his acclaimed memoir of 2008, Mount describes with all of his usual wit, self-deprecation and astuteness how he came to arrive at the policy unit, Thatcher seemingly having forgotten that she’d once thought him an “idle and effete youth who was full of the consensus mush of the 1960s and who was indulging Keith Joseph [later a minister in her cabinet] in his fatal tendency to believe the last thing he was told”.

So who was Aunt Munca? She was married to Mount's uncle, his father's brother, for over 20 years, but Munca (a portentous sign that she abandoned all names except that of Beatrix Potter's Bad Mouse!) made sure that her previous lives were unknown to the wealthy family she finally fortuitously (for her) married into. I found my mind venturing elsewhere and having to reread entire sections because I had lost focus. Not a good sign. Was he frightened of Thatcher? “You couldn’t not be frightened of her! 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.’” If he sounds a bit like Sir Humphrey in Yes, Minister, he is also able to see how things must sometimes have felt from her side. “The snobbery [Thatcher was, famously, the daughter of a grocer] was quite startling, stretching all the way from Christopher Soames [the Conservative cabinet minister] to Jonathan Miller [the theatre director]; the use of suburban as the ultimate insult, combined with sexism of a kind which even then seemed out of date.” Extraordinary… shed[s] a brilliant light on the strangeness of people's lives, the need for disguise and masquerade, the shame that drives people to act in the most peculiar ways, the ghosts that reside, unburied, within us.”— Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday Ferdinand Mount is a British gem who writes like a dream. I would probably enjoy reading a shopping list written by him.From the moment of my birth in 1974 until her death, Georgie was the person to whom I was closest, after my parents. It was Georgie my father called from Westminster Hospital in 1974, to say, ‘You’re a Godmother’. Georgie dashed from Victoria to be at my mother’s bedside, meeting me when I was three hours old. When we moved from central London to Fulham, in search of more space, Georgie and Claude followed. One of my earliest memories is of Georgie arriving at our house. I can’t have been more than three or four. “Look who’s here,” I remember my mother saying. “It’s Georgie, your Godmother.”“Georgie’s not my Godmother,” I said, quite confidently. “She’s my friend.” I didn’t yet understand that people could be more than one thing and if it was a choice between ‘godmother’ and ‘friend’, then Georgie was ‘friend’. I think she realised in that moment that she’d been subtly upgraded because she never forgot it, recalling it right up to the weeks before her death.

I found this book listed on The Economists' top ten books of 2020. And who would mistrust The Economist?As a young, well-connected and sociable woman, Georgie began to catch the eye of famous men. Inexplicably, each time a union got anywhere near the altar, Munca and Greig stepped in to sabotage it. Georgie’s engagement to the journalist, David Dimbleby, was the first of these. The couple’s final stab-wound was the manner in which they let Georgie know the truth of her provenance — via documents left behind after they died. They had obviously given it great thought and decided that it was best if the truth came out once they were no longer there to answer questions. It needs a writer of wit, imagination and empathy to carry me along from one layer of the tissue to the next. Mount is such a writer.”— The Oldie