If Vincent Poklewski Koziell has really drunk as much as he claims in this book I doubt he would be the spry and handsome 88-year-old to be seen bicycling around Sloane Square that he is today — a slight fall having proved no impediment to his progress.
He came from a grand family of diplomats on his mother’s side. She, Zoia de Stoeckl, was clearly ravishingly pretty and became, aged 18, a maid of honour to the last empress of Russia. Vincent’s father derived from what he describes as ‘run-down Polish nobility’ (only 56 peasants); but the family seems to have had an astonishing ability to rise, phoenix-like, from successive reverses, a huge fortune disappearing overnight in the Russian revolution.
The two met at a party of Lady Cunard’s in London and when they were married returned to Poland, where he had a good job running a smelting and mining business. Unbelievably, it all happened again when the Germans arrived in 1939. Vincent, with his mother and brother, reached London only a week before the invasion began. Once again everything was lost.
Princess Marina and Zoia had been friends for many years and there are photographs of the Duke and Duchess of Kent arriving in an open landau with footmen in top hats and livery, of peasant beaters in high Cossack woolly hats with a brown furry carpet of wild boar laid out in the snow in front of them. Now the Kents welcomed and sheltered the Poklewski Koziell family first in their home at Coppins and then in the chauffeur’s cottage on their estate. There are sweet, informal photographs of the present Queen and Princess Margaret and their parents with lots of friends and relations, amongst whom Prince Philip stands out as a startlingly handsome boy.
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