Coronet, Bingham, Paris, Debs, Spies

Coronet Among the Weeds by Charlotte Bingham

published1963

Yet again! In an earlier post I explained my long-held interest in Charlotte Bingham’s book. I don’t love it as I once did, but I still have enough to say for another post.

When I re-read it recently I confirmed that this was the book that first made me interested in the world of debutantes from approx. 1920 to 1966. It is (as the Irish would say) far from debutantes that I was raised, and my champagne socialism means I don’t have a moment for the entitlement and the unearned incomes. But the nature of it has always fascinated me, and this book gives a very clear picture of the way it worked. As is classic of a certain kind of young woman, she claims to hate and despise the  whole system, but did make her way through it.

First of all she has a good time in Paris where she is being ‘finished’ in a rather muddled way. (‘studied at the Sorbonne’ is how it is described.) And we have this:

Then a super-looking Italian came up and asked me if I would sit on the back of his Vespa

It’s very heady stuff driving up the Champs Elysee on the back of a Vespa, kissing your hand to the cheering hands. When we reached the top I got off and a gendarme sat me on one of the traffic lights. I couldn’t stop laughing. I had that fantastic feeling when you’re going to burst any minute. You just feel you could pick up everything and take a bite out of it like a piece of cake. Great slices of sky, Champs Elysees, gendarme. Everything.

(Why am I quoting this unimportant bit? Because Stap me if I didn’t have this exact picture in my secret files…)

 

And I liked the Frenchwoman who said ‘everyone knew that the only good thing in England was le cardigan anglais and le duc d'Edinbourg.’

So – then back to London, and the beatnik era featured in the earlier post. And then

After I’d been a beatnik I thought I’d have a real change. So I became a deb.

You get asked to someone’s tea party and meet all these girls. They take down your name and address and ask you to their tea party, and you do the same to them and ask them to yours.

Your mother is a very important bit of being a deb. She has to go to all these lunch parties and chat to other mothers. My mother found luncheon chit-chat an awful strain. She’s very intelligent so that kind of conversation got her down. I used to cheer her up beforehand, and she borrowed my grandmother’s diamonds and things. But it was still hard work. She was quite amusing about them afterwards though. She said the frightfully rich ones kept their minks on all through lunch. She said they’d rather melt than take them off. And everyone cheered up when they heard I had a brother. The point of being a deb is to get married I suppose, though not many of them do. But that’s the object really. So a brother is good news.

 

 

There are cocktail parties, country house parties, dances in big posh hotels…

I had a dance of course. And a cocktail party and everything. Rather good. I thought so anyway

 That involves her father:

He isn’t bad at talking to people once he gets down to it. He puts on this very pally expression and they tell him practically anything. Nearly every party there he is with this pally expression listening to some dope and them telling him the secrets of their hearts. I don’t think he wants to hear the secrets of their hearts. He’s just got this face people tell things to. Honestly they just see his face and make straight for it.

 

Yes well he was a spy, so that’s handy isn’t it? John le Carre says that if anyone was the model for George Smiley it was John Bingham, who also wrote thrillers. One of them is on the blog here, and the MI5 connection features in that post as well as this one.

Next she does a modelling course…. (all this shows she was the original Sloane Ranger)

She does various jobs, she is no good at anything.

Of the girls she knew, she says:

One has one’s hair done at the Queen’s hairdresser, one’s writing paper from the Queen’s stationer, one’s weekends in Berks, Bucks or Wilts, and one’s weeny runabout to Harrods to meet one’s girl friends for lunch. And one swoons over teenyminded weeds in Knightsbridge flats.

 

And the men:

I think you can class most men. Supermen, weed, drip, lech. I only met one person you couldn’t. He wasn’t a superman. He wasn’t a weed or a drip. And he wasn’t a lech. He was a womanizer but he wasn’t a lech…What he was, I think, was a vagabond.

She is very judgemental, and has her Views on sex and abortion, which I suppose were of their time.

I’m trying to be fair, and I did enjoy the book when I was approx. 15 but there is not a great deal to it now.

Charlotte Bingham went on to have  a very successful career as a writer, including on the legendary TV series Upstairs, Downstairs. She also wrote many romance novels.