Digby Durrant

An innocent abroad

issue 20 January 2007

Even as a boy Charles knew there was something false about his father Adrian Mainguard. Why? Nobody else did. An internationally famed pianist and composer, blessed with Dionysian looks and a forehead Virginia Woolf described as ‘like a bow window revealing his soul … there was something god-like about him’. Benjamin Britten, Auden, Sackville-Wests and Bloomsburys, all chanted praises. He was married to Edie, the daughter of the chairman of Vickers-Armstrong, and had performed for the royal family at Windsor. But still Charles sensed a flaw in the crystal. At least in his own eyes time was to prove him right. ‘Discovery of the truth about him set the compass for my life.’  

When their London home is blitzed  Charles goes to his grandparents up in the hills behind Brecon. While there he discovers his mother had married beneath her, which he finds romantic as he does when he discovers that his father was the son of a baker and his original name was Nigel Shand.

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