Charles Duff’s memoir tells a sad tale of cruelty and betrayal with spry wit rather than bitter resentment. Notwithstanding the subtitle’s threat of earnest Welsh soul-searching, Charley’s Woods is tart, arch and crisp. It recalls a strange, lonely childhood with brisk frivolity and a ruthless perception of other people’s oddities, vices and humours.
Duff was born in Battersea in 1949. His mother, Irene Gray, was a Dublin social worker who pioneered role-play therapy in Ireland, and became pregnant by an Irish don of French-Jewish descent. After her son’s surreptitious birth, she hastened back to Dublin. In a hugger-mugger fashion, without legal formalities, two collateral royalties, the Marchioness of Carisbrooke and her sister-in-law the Countess of Athlone, arranged for the infant to be adopted, at the age of ten weeks, by Sir Michael and Lady Caroline Duff.
The Duffs had a mariage blanc.
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