A Moment in Time reminded me of the sort of British expatriate women I used to meet in the south of France more than 50 years ago. They were very proud of their nationality, rather broke and talked down to most people. Colonel so-and-so and Lord so-and-so were distant relations or acquaintances.
It also reminded me of Separate Tables, Terence Rattigan’s brilliant play about snobbish souls living out their desperate lives in a grubby seaside hotel back in the 1950s. Except that poor old Veronica Lucan, now dead by her own hand, does not in any way write like Rattigan. Instead, she details her everyday disasters methodically, listing all the bad things that have happened to her. And I must admit there have been many.
She began life as the rather plain, middle-class Veronica Duncan, from a military background, with a beautiful younger sister, Christina, who married Bill Shand Kydd. He became a hero of mine for his death-defying horsemanship and his courage, following a riding accident, when he was left unable to move anything except his eyes.
Veronica is not nice about Christina and Bill, accusing them of alienating her three children, who chose to live with their aunt and uncle after their father, the infamous 7th Earl of Lucan, had murdered their nanny, Sandra Rivett, mistaking her for their mother. Needless to say, Veronica’s theory of blaming the Shand Kydds did not have many adherents, if any. And by all accounts, the children have grown up to be not only useful citizens but very engaging people, although I don’t know them.
Veronica begins by listing the aristocratic connections of the man she married — a strange way to start an autobiography — and continues tiresomely about dolls and teddies and their various names until we get to the meat of the story.
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