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The Bolter

Lust in a hot climate

Frances Osborne
Virago, 316pp, £18.99,

Sara Wheeler

Wednesday, 7th May 2008

Sara Wheeler on Frances Osborne's biography of Idina Sackville

One husband complained that she was a nymphomaniac, and, on Osborne’s evidence he was right: the five marriages were just the start of it. But she was capable of work. ‘She had by now’, says Osborne, when the story reaches 1940, ‘built up one of the strongest Guernsey herds in Africa’ (though this, one imagines, was not a hotly contested field). As Idina’s friend Rosita Forbes put it, ‘she was an extraordinary mixture of sybarite and pioneer’. When Joss was mysteriously shot in his car in 1941 Idina was devastated, although the couple were long divorced. She attended every day of the Nairobi trial of Sir Jock Delves Broughton, Joss’s lover’s husband, who was eventually acquitted. The episode seemed to mark the start of a decline, and Idina died of cancer at the age of 62 in her cottage outside Mombasa, a ‘tattooed former sailor’ boyfriend at her side.

Osborne’s prolixity with cliché suits this ludicrous story (money is spent like water, inconveniences are avoided like the plague and hatches are battened down wherever necessary. The years, inevitably, are war-torn.) The book’s title is after Nancy Mitford’s Bolter, the narrator’s errant mother in The Pursuit of Love and its sequels, and Osborne would have been wise to study the Mitford style. The anachronisms are unfortunate — Tom Mosley ‘parading his pecs’, for example (ghastly image). There is no sense of an inner life, not even an indication that Idina had one, and the reader might wish for the development of a theme or two, to brake the narrative gallop.

Overall, though, Osborne writes in a pleasant, breezy style, and The Bolter is a highly recommended light read — providing you can follow the tangled family trees, the shifting alliances and, above all, the shagging. How did they keep it up (so to speak)? When they were not actually at it, they were glugging morphine, attacking their spouses’ lovers with rhino-hide whips or shooting at one another. What the Keenyans made of it, one can only imagine.

Sara Wheeler is the author of Too Close to the Sun: The Audacious Life and Times of Denys Finch Hatton.

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