An innocent abroad

Even as a boy Charles knew there was something false about his father Adrian Mainguard. Why? Nobody else did. An internationally famed pianist and composer, blessed with Dionysian looks and a forehead Virginia Woolf described as ‘like a bow window revealing his soul … there was something god-like about him’. Benjamin Britten, Auden, Sackville-Wests and Bloomsburys, all chanted praises. He was married to Edie, the daughter of the chairman of Vickers-Armstrong, and had performed for the royal family at Windsor. But still Charles sensed a flaw in the crystal. At least in his own eyes time was to prove him right. ‘Discovery of the truth about him set the compass for my life.’  

When their London home is blitzed  Charles goes to his grandparents up in the hills behind Brecon. While there he discovers his mother had married beneath her, which he finds romantic as he does when he discovers that his father was the son of a baker and his original name was Nigel Shand. These were not flaws. Charles was an innocent without snobbery, rare in those pre-war days. In these Welsh holidays he chose the company of a handyman on his grandfather’s estate, who taught  him to shoot, and the chauffeur, who introduces him to snooker, rather than the boys, mostly Etonians, who his grandparents knew. Back with his parents now moved to Kent, he meets Francis, a boy with a strange and mesmeric personality who plans to kill his mother as he believes he’s the illegitimate son of her German lover, which makes him a German too. He shows Charles the grave he’s  dug in readiness for her.

Pryce-Jones sets a cracking pace. Facts and events flash by thick and fast.  Frequent pit stops are imperative, a time to take deep breaths, remove goggles and  clean them for the laps ahead which become increasingly dark with sexual menace.