Gurinder Chaddha’s latest film Viceroy’s House was inspired by the charming memoir by Pamela Hicks, daughter of Lord Louis and Edwina Mountbatten, covering her family’s eventful life during wartime Britain, and the tumultuous period that led up to the independence of India and the formation of Pakistan. (The Indian edition of the book has a still of the film on the cover).

In Daughter Of Empire: My Life As A Mountbatten, Hicks makes no apology for the fact that she lived a very privileged life as one whose father was related to the British royal family; but she and her sister Patricia were also routinely uprooted from their home, or wherever they had settled in, and sent to live with relatives and friends to protect them from the ravages of World War II. The young girls come out of it all rather unaffected by the upheaval in their lives.

She writes rather candidly of her parents’ open marriage, where both took on lovers. There was no furtiveness about their affairs—the lovers visited their home—and an astounding lack of jealousy. Hicks writes with amusement how her mother juggled her various lovers; “When my mother returned from shopping one day she was met with, 'Mr Larry Gray is in the drawing room, Mr Sandford is in the library, Mr Ted Philips is in the boudoir, Señor Portago [is] in the anteroom and I don’t know what to do with Mr Molyneux’.”

But under the glitter of the royalty and aristocratic privilege is strength and an unwavering sense of duty. Edwina travelled to trouble spots and jumped right in to help whenever there was a crisis.

There is a great deal of charm in how she describes royal protocol, the time it takes to plan every event, and how everything is meticulously laid out. As Princess Elizabeth’s lady-in-waiting, Hicks travelled all over the Commonwealth—she describes these trips in detail, and with great affection for the Princess who was holidaying in Kenya with her new husband Prince Philip when news of her father’s death broke, and overnight she was Queen, with a whole new set of responsibilities. Not once does she break down in public.

She writes an entertaining chapter about the time the girls spent at the lavish home of the American billionaire Mrs Vanderbilt, poking gentle fun at her flashiness and ignorance (she hadn’t heard of Hamlet, and when told about the Prince of Denmark, she sent regards to his father!).

The book is written in a breezy tone that make light of the trauma the young Pamela may have suffered—she does admit that her experiences made her “self sufficient.” The family’s pet mongoose has an extended cameo.

To Indian readers, there is interest in the gossip linking Edwina Mountbatten with Pandit Nehru—Hicks believes their friendship was deep and sincere, but there was no affair. The Mountbattens were in India at a very difficult time, as Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten had to deal with the transfer of power and the horrors of Partition, which the lived through unflinchingly. Hicks makes her fondness for Nehru and love for India very clear—in fact when she returned to England, she had some trouble adjusting to life in her own country.

It’s a very readable memoir that is honest, but makes no claims to depth—she writes it more or less like it were her personal diary through which she gives the fortunate reader a glimpse of a lifestyle of pomp, ceremony and noblesse oblige, that they can only imagine.


Daughter of Empire: My Life As A Mountbatten
By Pamela Hicks
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Pages: 272