After the Coronation, royal expert Hugo Vickers will become a recluse and say a fond farewell to parties, London – and sex
The time has come for me to disappear.
I knew that when the Queen died, the game was over for me.
As a small boy (back in 1959), I attached myself to her coat-tails by a long, invisible, metaphorical thread and flew happily behind her for decades.
Occasionally I flew alongside her, and those moments were special. Her death on 8th September was like the sounding of the Last Post.
Until this May, the Coronation needed to be explained – an arrogant statement, but few had studied the ritual and few remembered the last great service in 1953. I had written a book about it, and that kept me busy with talks in Britain, New York, Washington and California, and as part of the ITN team on the day.
After that – nothing. Niente altro. Time for renunciation, the most rewarding time of all.
I was one of the lucky few who relished lockdown. The government asked me to stay out of the way and I was happy to do so. Everything was cancelled. If I happened to watch a film in the afternoon, I was serving my country, helping the nation. It held the same joy as being pronounced ‘off games’ at school.
Meanwhile I never worked so hard in my life. No time was wasted in tedious London traffic jams or squashed into crowded tubes. I hardly used my car. Provisions were delivered to the door and left outside – as if I were a leper. I gave lectures in Toronto, New York, San Francisco and Palm Beach, without straying from my desk.
I am lucky to have been taught how to be a recluse by two particularly extreme ones – Gladys Deacon, Duchess of Marlborough (1881-1977), and Stephen Tennant (1906-87).
Stephen was the brightest of the Bright Young Things of the 1920s. By the time I met him, he had gone to seed. He once said to me, ‘My doctor tells me I am too fat, but I like myself and the more there is of me the better.’
The fact that I knew them both indicates that they did receive visitors occasionally, though they preferred to be alone.
Gladys Deacon quoted Thoreau: ‘I never found the companion that was as companionable as solitude.’ ‘Goodbye to all that’ was her motto. After the horrors of Blenheim, she settled in the ‘derelict hamlet’ of Chacombe. She put chicken wire round her property, bought geese which attacked everybody, put blackout curtains over her windows and had them drenched in oil once a year.
Villagers recall her walking at night, her torch flickering on the ceilings of their bedrooms as she passed by. She took in food in a basket lowered from an upper window. When her Polish servant came, she lowered the door key in the same way and he let himself in.
Here we have a good formula. When visitors come, they must ring my doorbell for about 30 minutes. I will then lower the basket. And I can see myself walking alone on Salisbury Plain in my long, black cloak, with a lantern flickering in the darkness of the night.
Stephen Tennant took to his bed, supposedly dying of a consumptive illness in the late 1920s. He was still there in the 1980s. He drew the curtains against the world, and received visitors only on his terms and at whim.
Juliette Huxley once wrote to him, ‘Oh, Stephen, do you live in such an ivory tower that the clock only chimes when you bid it to?’ A blissful negation of time. He spent his hours reading and writing; his brain remained sound.
What will I miss? Nothing. Many things I have done and I don’t need to do them again. I am thought to be social, but that is because people see me only when I am out and about. Every time I get an invitation, with few exceptions, my first thought is how to escape.
In 2016, I was ‘obliged’ to go to the Caribbean, to promote Commonwealth Walkways. There were only two things in London that I was sorry to miss in seven weeks away – a book launch, of Josephine Loewenstein’s Wind in My Hair, and a play, The Red Barn, with Elizabeth Debicki, whose performance I had so enjoyed in The Night Manager.
I worked out that if I go to a party, someone might ask, ‘Hugo, what are you doing? How are you?’ and I would reply.
But if I am not there, someone else can answer for me. ‘Have you seen Hugo? What is he doing?’ I don’t need to be there. I can be at home reading a book.
While I’m reading, if a character goes down the Grand Canal in Venice or walks on the Great Wall of China, I have done that. I can picture it. I don’t need to do it again.
Sex? One schoolfriend of mine has dedicated his life to having as much sex as possible. He has a short memory – so he has to keep doing it. Interestingly, the only girls he remembers are the ones he didn’t get. So his head contains images of sensible girls who eluded his grasp (literally his grasp) while those who succumbed have faded away (just as well, sometimes).
I have a long memory.
I am not quite ready to go the whole hog and put up the blackout curtains. I like sunlight, but that may change. The genuine recluse will eliminate day and night altogether, sleep when tired, and wake when ready.
Yet what about the proposed lecture tour of Long Island? Well, I can go and still pretend to be a recluse at home.
An Australian friend tells me I can get a machine that not only switches lights on and off but possibly burns the toast to give the impression that I am at home.
Meanwhile, I can be in a favourite retreat elsewhere in the world – the Pensione Bencistà in Fiesole, or the treehouse in the rainforest on Dominica.
Perhaps I’d better think it out again. I won’t be quite a complete stay-at- home recluse.
Hugo Vickers has written biographies of the Queen Mother, Queen Mary and the Duchess of Windsor
