Beauty and the beast: Jane Birkin’s love affair with Serge Gainsbourg

I met Jane Birkin’s parents, who flit across these pages. Her mother, Judy Campbell, was an actress in Noël Coward plays and
a cabaret singer who’d worked with Charles Hawtrey, and when I invited her to a party once she drove her Mini up the steps and into the hotel lobby. Jane’s father, David, had a good war, his boat picking up pilots and spies hidden by the Resistance on the Breton coast. He told me ’Allo ’Allo wasn’t a comedy, it was documentary realism. He endured many operations on his optic nerve. A piece of hip bone was grafted to his eye socket. His lungs, as Jane says, were weakened by ‘too many anaesthetics’.

The Birkin fortune came from Nottingham lace. There were aristocrats (the Russells) in the background. Jane therefore spent a very comfortable childhood, in big houses with lawns and tennis courts, and, as is clear from Munkey Diaries (Munkey being her toy monkey to whom private thoughts were confided), deprivation has never been on the agenda.