A.N. Wilson

Family favourites | 11 September 2010

Because Deborah Devonshire’s journalism has nearly always made me laugh, and because she seems like one of the jollier aunts in P. G. Wodehouse — an Aunt Dahlia, not an Aunt Agatha — I had expected her memoirs to provide chuckles on every page.

issue 11 September 2010

Because Deborah Devonshire’s journalism has nearly always made me laugh, and because she seems like one of the jollier aunts in P. G. Wodehouse — an Aunt Dahlia, not an Aunt Agatha — I had expected her memoirs to provide chuckles on every page.

Because Deborah Devonshire’s journalism has nearly always made me laugh, and because she seems like one of the jollier aunts in P. G. Wodehouse — an Aunt Dahlia, not an Aunt Agatha — I had expected her memoirs to provide chuckles on every page. In fact it is a sad book, taken all in all. Two of the more poignant passages, which will linger in my memory for a very long time, are about her dead babies, and about the alcoholism of her magnificent husband, the 11th Duke of Devonshire.

Mark, Victor and Mary, the babies, lived, respectively, five hours, seven hours and four hours. Only recently was their mother told, by the vicar’s widow at Edensor, the village next to Chatsworth, that the infants were all baptised by ‘Moucher’, the author’s mother-in-law and wife of the 10th Duke.

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