Lady Pamela Berry (Pam to everyone, so that is what I too shall call her) did many things in her life. She was president of the Incorporated Society of Fashion Designers and chair of the British Museum Society; and she conducted a passionate ten-year affair with the goatish Malcolm Muggeridge. But she was best known as a salonnière. In fact she was the last of the great salonnières of the past century.
At her house in Barton Street, Westminster, within the sound of the division bell, she gathered parliamentarians, writers, aristocrats and wits, including the Lloyd Georges, Isaiah Berlin and Nancy Mitford. Across her table, where ‘gen con’ (general conversation) was the rule, flew barbs, ferocious arguments, political secrets and top-level gossip. Nothing was allowed to interfere with the talk. Even the food, always excellent, had to be easy to manage – no globe artichokes or shellfish, for instance.
She was born in May 1914, the youngest child of F.E. Smith, the brilliant lawyer whose rise to fame and fortune took him to an earldom and the Lord Chancellorship. She grew up in Charlton, Northamptonshire, in a rambling stone house known as ‘The Cottage’. From the start she was a confident, powerful personality: rows with her siblings sometimes became so physical that once her mother had to ring for the butler and ask him to ‘separate their ladyships’.
Harriet Cullen, her daughter, who has based much of this book on her mother’s diaries and letters, has divided it into sections that make the chronology sometimes confusing. But it is a fascinating story – of someone who grew up spoilt, good-looking, forceful, privy to many secrets and attractive to men.
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