A woman of substance | 31 January 2013

Hermione Ranfurly wrote two books. One was called The Ugly One. The other, the first, was called To War with Whitaker. Its success came as a surprise to her, but to none of her legion of friends. It chronicled her war. Recently married to Dan, a Northern Irish peer whose father had lost almost everything, mostly on the green baize, she determined to pursue him, his horses and his yeomanry regiment to the Middle East, no matter that the army, the War Office and official Whitehall expressly forbade such camp following.

She eventually reached Cairo and secured a job in SOE. She had already demonstrated her determination by getting there. Once in Egypt, she used her genius for diagnosing character and her infectious enthusiasm to get to know anyone who was anyone. To spend five minutes in her company was to have a good time, and her occasionally ribald sense of humour disguised a seriousness and a capacity for hard work that gave her the stamina for life. Needless to say, she excited a good deal of jealously, particularly in the gossip hothouse that was wartime Cairo.

She continued to keep a diary, sometimes intermittently, for the rest of her long life. The present book is an edited version of her postwar diaries, lovingly produced by her only child Caroline. I pounced on them as soon as they appeared because I knew Hermione well and loved her. Like all her friends, I hoped that this new book would rekindle memories of her voice, her humour, her loyalty, her sympathy for people and her capacity for gossip, some of it salacious. And I was not disappointed, although Caroline has, like her mother in To War with Whitaker, usually spared the feelings of the families of individuals about whom she could be gloriously rude.

There is a danger that diaries of this kind are of consuming interest to the friends and family of the diarist but not to the general reader.