LADY FORMBY’S MEMOIR: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL TALE OF MY LIFE IN MY WORDS - CHAPTER ONE
Leaving old Mona
Leaving old Mona
Make no mistake, I am no inspiration to the aspiring young women of the world, though having read my memoir I predict these fillies of the modern epoch will likely have a deep response to my life story, maybe even a reflex of gratitude for the paths I have cut them through the jungle of our society. I am a woman who through storm and drought, blizzards and obstacles, has bound forward to the beats of my own bodhran, against the coastal gales of eras shaped by fathers and husbands and their rigid values that grip the female purpose1. Away a raffle yersel, I say. My life is mine.
Footnote 1: My editor (not a real editor) suggests this whole opening paragraph is a bit analogically stretched.
The worldly reader may note a certain inflection in my prose. Aye, it is true. I am, what London folk would call, of Scottish extraction. Monaduke House, nestled in the long-held estate of my family, is home to the yellow sprinkles of Gorse, the bright and burning hue of the Flame Flower as well as enough Bog Myrtle to rid the highlands of midge once and for all. The house, Old Mona as she is known to its inhabitants2, first opened its doors in 1648, a good year before Charles I was relinquished of his head and Cromwell popped off to the Emerald Isle for a bit of violence. It stead the clan of the MacDowells who then presided over lands that bore deep into the Galloway Forest, until my lot came up from Winchester in late 17th Century and, as London folk would say, fucked them right up the Aristotle.
Footnote 2: I include here the servants and their dependants (who will also be servants once of legal working age).
Old Mona was then3, much like me in my younger years: of an uncertain frame that would have to grow into its beauty much as I would settle into my body. Unlike Old Mona, however, my banquet halls and buttery didn’t need rebuilding after a thorough ransacking by English master masons and local apprentices from Ayr4. The iteration that I grew up in was one of a manor, of stone and millwork, of upkeep and intricacy. None of that ramshackle sheep-house shit the MacDowells resided in.
Footnote 3: 16th Century under the MacDowells, not the smouldering ashes of what my lot left in their wake.
Footnote 4: In case there is any uncertainty, which there probably is given the awkward wording, the masons and apprentices I refer to did the rebuilding bit, not the ransacking stuff.
My father, Sir Lucas Formby, ran Old Mona much like he ran his shipping business and farm: with efficiency, with acute, almost obsessive attention to detail, in combination with the employment of low-paid, if paid at all, staff of illiterate locals who had to choose between tending to his every command or to starve in some hut somewhere on the heath. Of course, his bank employed a higher level of personnel given the stuff with calculations and finance regulations. But boats and sailing, a-milking and a-maiding, could be pretty much done by anyone with two arms. That reminds me. Poor Mr Arnold…I still remember the day he was dismissed. “We are not a charity!” Daddy told me5.
Footnote 5: Daddy did actually have a charity, but not one for amputees or for unemployed people. He was more interested in conservation and collecting relics.
Speaking of relics, though that only works if you are reading the footnotes, so go back and check you read at least the last one. Speaking of relics, Sir Daddy was fond of purchasing antiquities and artefacts from across Britain. Some of which were portable and could be housed in the grand rooms of our Old Mona while others, Stonehenge for example, unfortunately had to stay where they were. Old churches were the same, couldn’t move those things even if you did room with the now Minister of Town and Country Planning at Oxford. Even Daddy had to follow the rules…as did I as a young lady.
I left Old Mona in 1951 to reside in our Knightsbridge residence. Coming from my Arcadia north of the border, I arrived to the thrill of my new urban existence, one that raised the beat of my childly heart, and one that would nurture that childly me into adultly me. Too enthralled was I with London life to miss the tamed wilds of a childhood home. A young woman of 17, done with horses, done with shooting, done with botanical water colours. A metropolitan woman I would be.
My editor (not, as I said earlier, a real editor) has insisted this is a good moment to provide some context. I don’t think it is required, but on this rare occasion I will follow Francis’s advice. While I am of highborn and of royal association, I have retired to the suburbs of Geelong (that’s in Australia for those back home). So, a little signposting here. My memoir will trace a lifeline from Scotland to Highton, like a lifeline that starts near the soft but strong base of a thumb and ends up near one of your arthritic fingers. That’s a reference to palmistry, by the way6. Read that footnote before you go on!
Footnote 6: Having lived in Geelong for some time I feel obliged to regularly provide explanations and definitions for what are to the local reader at least, very foreign concepts and silly, strange words from what might seem like another age. So, let’s do some recapping before we move on and you lot get more confused. A bodhran, see paragraph one, is a traditional Scottish drum; Away an raffle yersel is a Scottish phrase for fuck off; Gorse, Flame Flower and Bog Mrytle (we’re in paragraph two now) are well known plants in the Scottish highlands; Cromwell invaded Ireland in 1649 and he also executed the king in 1648 for treason; to be fucked up the Artistotle is cockney for being fucked up the arse, I believe Australians like the term “buggered to Brisbane”. Paragraph five now, the Minister of Town and Country Planning was a ministry in the 1950s British government, now called something else, probably. Lastly, paragraph 7, the term palmistry is a fortune-telling practice of reading the lines on your palm. It is, of course, a credulous pseudoscience for hippies or those with cheirophilia, i.e. a sexual fetish for hands. Let’s move on. I advise you don’t skip the footnotes.
My coming out ball was the grandest of all the events that season. Sir Formby, my doting though often absent father, was keen for me to start courting a gentleman of similar stature and so, while I married myself with champagne and giddy dancing, papa was busy reviewing suitors with the same scruples that underpinned his hiring of senior management. For me, as a young woman entering the adult world like Alice entering a perverted dream, I was more interested in working my way down a fleshier rabbit hole. Sex, I’m talking about sex, of course7.
Footnote 7: That last part probably was a little analogically stretched, to use Francis’s phrase.
The night of my ball I found myself, blue silk dress from Dior, pearl necklace first purchased by my grandmother for the price of, I don’t know, a car or something, very expensive…I found myself in the pantry with the future Viscount Romaine. He was known to me at that time as Chipper, a name he received from his Oxford rugby comrades following his match-winning try over Cambridge. I assume it involved a chip, which I assume is something you can do in rugby, a game, which I assume, requires moving a ball around with occasional movements some of which are known as chips, I assume. I didn’t care so much for his name nor his rugby fame; it was his eyes that drew me in.
Daddy Formby would have approved of my interest, though probably not of all my actions in the pantry. A sexual technique frequently used in the 1950s, and perfected by moi, was known as a Jolly Jack Horner. I have no idea what it is called now, something obscene like butt-thumping, or hole-corking. With my right hand, my most sustainable hand for lengthy exertion, I worked the shaft of his penis with the vigour and commitment of maids a-milking in an agricultural competition. My left, because it is important to use your weaker hand given the sensitivity of the male anus, plugs a buttered thumb in and out, in and out, in and out, much the way you might mash a potato8. But mash you must not, rather the tip of the thumb taps away at the prostate, stimulating, building tension, growing the potential in your sexual partner, in this case Chips or Chipper or whatever his name was, to the inevitable orgasm.
Footnote 8: I have never mashed a potato.
And orgasm he did almost to the point of dehydration. My satisfaction, obviously less inevitable given my more complex anatomy, would still be achieved given the future Viscount Romaine was a decent young gentleman. Gentleman in those days were committed to ensuring, as duty and politeness required, that a lady got her dessert too. And so I did.
Incidentally, later in life, I once used something similar to a Jolly Jack Horner to return Brealey, my beloved old Corgi, back from a febrile seizure. I predicted, and was correct in doing so, that the nerve stimulation would end the canine fit. It did with great speed, though Brealey never really looked at me the same, most likely because the intraocular pressure of the fit, or perhaps the half Horner I administered, had damaged the blood vessels behind his eyes. Or he was just terrified of me and my thumbs. Poor Brealey.
The season of 1951 was splendid. My coming out ball was for me the moment at which I stepped into my womanhood, like a brave young girl raising her rifle for the first time to blast clay pigeons from the sky. It was an early trial for the real thing, a taster for the flurry and fury of maturity. Soon I would be killing real pigeons with my own rifle, a rifle of vim and single-minded gusto9.
Footnote 9: Obviously, you don’t shoot pigeons, usually its wild red grouse or pheasants.
From my quartier general in Knightsbridge, I spend my late teens in a frolic across the city, dizzyingly darting from party to party, from one engagement to another, a life of what the French refer to as a faire la fête (London folk would use the term knees up, which is rather apt for the interludes I would frequent between glasses of Pol Roger and attempts at the Shorty George). Sex, I’m talking about sex again10.
Footnote 10: I feel the need to do a recap of the terms I’m using again. Let’s get through these quickly as the chapter is almost finished. Going backwards this time, the Shorty George is a type of dance which became very popular in my youth, Pol Roger is a very nice champagne which you probably can’t afford. The French phrases now, faire la fête translates to party or celebration, quartier general is a military headquarters, I use it here as an analogue for my home in London which would be like a base from which I would adventure, you get the idea. Clay pigeons, I probably don’t need to explain that, and a half Horner is just the thumb up the bum, not the penis stuff. Let’s get back to it, chapter 1 is about to finish on a cliffhanger.
I knew, however, that I did not want to be just a socialite, my life was to be of more substance. I did not just want to be a wife and mother, a lady of peerage pottering around some grand house planning dinners and soirées, standing for dress measurements for the upcoming season and so on. And so, I took my first job, a journalist at The Islington Dispatch. An occupation that would take me around the world and back again, and then around the world again before coming back again, and go hence around the world again till I finally disembarked in Australia. My home where I write this memoir. My memoir. My life in my words. My writing of those words. Me.
