Kiss Myself Goodbye: The Many Lives of Aunt Munca

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If there really is nothing wrong with being gay, then why is the light Mount shines on his uncle’s secrets so much kinder and more sparing than that shone on his aunt’s? Without explicitly stating it, he gives the impression that Greig’s gay scandal was some kind of one-off. Georgie spoke very little about her upbringing and even less about her adoptive family, but one of the few things she told me was that her father was gay. No ifs or buts. He was not a straight man who just had a gay moment. 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. Delightfully compulsive and unforgettably original. Mount unpeels the layers of this mysterious life with the tenacity of an experienced detective and the excitement of a fresh-eyed enthusiast. * Hadley Freeman, author of House of Glass: The Story and Secrets of a Twentieth-Century Jewish Family * The mystery of the borrowed baby nags at Mr. Mount, as do other, seemingly related conundrums of Betty’s life: her ruthless sabotaging of Georgie’s marriage plans, the serial romances of her past, her hazy connection to her jaunty brother Buster, her real age—her real name(s), for heaven’s sake. “I had tugged the thread,” he writes of his growing curiosity, “and I could not resist following it to the end.”

Just how much more there was to this armor-clad butterfly is revealed—incrementally and irresistibly—in “Kiss Myself Goodbye: The Many Lives of Aunt Munca,” a family history so deftly excavated and winningly conjured that it restores our faith in a literary species too often given to flabbiness and self-absorption. “It is a personal memoir that turned into a quest while I wasn’t looking,” Mr. Mount explains of his decade-long exhumation of a past riddled with as many deceptions and double-crosses as any espionage novel. “In this book, nobody’s recollections are reliable,” he cautions. And isn’t that putting it mildly.PG didn’t mind that this client neglected to pay a legal bill on occasion because she provided him with so many great stories for use during gatherings with his brothers and sisters in the legal profession during conferences sponsored by various bar associations. 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. The book is like a breath of fresh air and un like any other book I have ever read. It is quirky, quintessentially British and very charming. It is also fascinating, entertaining and funny. The author has a very relaxed style of writing, almost conversational in nature. Add to that any number of wry comments and amusing asides, as well as the ability to laugh at the ridiculous antics of his own family and you really have a very special book indeed. On top of all that it is an exceedingly enjoyable romp through the social history of British high society during most of the 20th Century. Aunt Munca never told the truth about anything. Calling herself after the mouse in a Beatrix Potter story, she was already a figure of mystery during the childhood of her nephew Ferdinand Mount. Half a century later, a series of startling revelations sets him off on a tortuous quest to find out who this extraordinary millionairess really was. 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.

It's thought-provoking, heart-wrenching and a real eye-opener. All is not always as it seems, let us not judge anyone based upon Title and material wealth. Through years of painstaking research Mount has discovered all. The 1930s popular song which he has taken for the title of his book opens with "I'm gonna kiss myself goodbye / goodbye, goodbye / I'm gonna get my wings and fly / Up high, up high". And boy! From her lamentably impoverished childhood in Sheffield, a dead labourer-father and a scant education in the unmerciful institution run by the Sisters of Mercy for the the very poor, did Munca fly! I was so pleased to read the last chapter to find out what had happened to everyone in the story. What meticulous research Mr Mount has done. 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”. It's written beautifully and with feeling for those involved, where there could have been a well-deserved disgust at how people have acted, there's a presence of it all happening 'in its time' and that despising the behaviour wouldn't be healthy or fair, as many of the conclusions are based on very well-researched hunches, if not actual fact. The amount of research is staggering and adds hugely to the narrative, and the results show just what can be achieved in researching your heritage - at your peril!Delicious ... As well as an ear for the cadences of a sentence, Mount has a remarkable ability to convey the feeling of place ... Beneath the surface of this sparklingly wry book you sense all kinds of unexplored feelings of abandonment and loss. * The Oldie * 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. In fact, it was after 20 that Georgie came alive, having achieved a measure of separation from the Mounts. She married Claude Johnson, owner of a computer company. My parents, Meg and Hugh, were at the wedding and later introduced Georgie and Claude to another couple, the artist, Andre de Moller and his wife, June. Everyone was within walking distance in the London borough of Westminster — my parents on West Halkin Street in Belgravia, Georgie and Claude in Marylebone and Andre and June on Cadogan Square in Knightsbridge. It was the late ’60s/early ’70s and London was the most fun it had ever been.

I'm normally not drawn to these sorts of memoirs (i.e. personal recollections about the author's wealthy family members), but Ferdinand Mount's "Kiss Myself Goodbye" is so well-written and bizarre that I stayed up late to finish the book in one sitting. It's true: Mount's mysterious Aunt Munca was a millionaire, but she was born into poverty and obtained her money by being a talented liar. Grifting those who've benefited from inherited wealth is a much more interesting story than pure nepotism. The life of Buster is hard to uncover, not least because a Google search brings up mainly dogs. 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”. Did Buster know that Munca was his mother? Who did he think was his father? And who on earth were Munca’s real parents? Kiss Myself Goodbye is a work of beauty. The simple truthfulness of Ferdinand Mount’s storytelling is irresistible. Betty reminded PG of one of his clients in the quite distant past, a woman who had her own unique style of divorcing (“dumping” might be a better term) a series of husbands.

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Immersing himself in birth and marriage archives along with newspaper reports of divorce and bigamy cases, among other tidbits, Mr. Mount uncovers a camouflaged trail that begins in the industrial north of England, about as far from the Café de Paris as you can get. “She was the daughter of John William Macduff of Sheffield, a scrap metal merchant,” Mr. Mount learns of Betty’s sister, Doris, who “told the truth when she filled in a form.” Betty, on the other hand, always pretended that Doris was an unrelated “honorary aunt,” even though the two women lived near each other in opulent Berkshire where Betty “in her Rolls might bump into Doris in her Bentley any day of the week.” For both sisters had married well, if a little too often in Betty’s case. 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 * The book is beautifully written. The author is a complete master of words - just the right tone, just the right word, just the right cadence to a sentence to communicate sympathy, amusement, or surprise as he unfolds the amazing and fascinating story of Aunt Manca. What a story! The contemporary references to T.S. Eliot, W.E. Johns, David Dimbleby, and many other well-known people whose lives brushed hers place the story firmly in the time he is describing. And the places where the action took place are described vividly. Particularly fascinating was his description of Manca's time in Crawford Mansions where she lived below T.S. Eliot at a time when Marylebone was a slum. 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.” 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.