Kiss Myself Goodbye: The Many Lives of Aunt Munca

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And then there's that gorgeous cover with the image of a glamorous looking man and woman lightly holding hands. I was desperate to know their story. Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (PG apologizes for the paywall, but hasn’t figured out a way around it.) Their will was the one way in which the Mounts might have said ‘sorry’ to Georgie, but — astoundingly — they appear not to have felt that they had anything for which to say sorry. Furthermore, they had clearly primed the trustees to operate against Georgie’s best interests. This process of making a request to the trust was so arduous and frightening for Georgie, it may have hastened her death.

I’ve been mixing with these spads [special advisers] and wonks for 40 years,” he says, crunching on a biscuit, “and I’d noticed both the fact that they seem gradually to have become the story themselves, and their increasing eccentricity. Dom [Cummings, Boris Johnson’s former chief adviser] is only one of dozens I’ve known who’ve been decidedly unusual. But that’s partly what attracts them to the politicians, who are uneasily conscious of being a bit dull and out-of-touch, even if they wouldn’t ever admit it. These wizards are very attractive; their wizardry mesmerises workaday politicians.” The second thing was the mention of Sheffield and there is a fabulous lengthy chapter in the book about my home city in the late 19th and early 20th century. I'm sure any reader would agree that there is something extra special about reading about a place you know well. But something tells me that Munca will be around for a while yet. She can’t be shaken off. I will always think of her, and I never even knew her. We are better now, aren’t we? Yes, I think we are. Our private lives are our own. There are no public pressures not to follow our desires. In fact, there are laws and codes of practice now to protect those desires from insult or obloquy. Deviancy is a thing of the past, because there is no sexual orthodoxy to deviate from. And you would need a stony heart not to welcome most of this. Stigmas belong on flowers and not on human beings. We find it difficult to imagine…how society could have been so harsh or unforgiving.” In the 1940s, they adopted an infant they named Serena Georgeanne, known as Georgie, raising her to believe she was their biological child. They expected perfection of this child. She was an extension of themselves rather than a person in her own right; a mannequin to titivate and then put in service to their public image. They inculcated in Georgie the belief that there was no point in doing anything if she couldn’t do it to an unimpeachable standard. Of course, given how captious they were, this was impossible for her. The bitter irony, however, was that she was brighter, more witty, more stunning than they were.PG didn’t mind that this client neglected to pay a legal bill on occasion because she provided him with so many great stories for use during gatherings with his brothers and sisters in the legal profession during conferences sponsored by various bar associations. Sure, there are elements of the book that draw you in; it is, in parts, a good social history of England a century ago and eventually you get interested in the author’s quest but it all takes far too long to get remotely interesting. It transpires that Ferdinand Mount (the author) has quite a colourful family history. It is impossible to say too much without giving away spoilers. However, suffice it to say that his Aunt Munca, with whose family he spent many a happy childhood holiday, was not necessarily quite what she seemed. Later in life he started to look into the minutiae of her life and this book is the result of his findings. It is to her credit that she only began to withdraw after a health ordeal hit her hard. As soon as Georgie told me about her oral cancer diagnosis, I came to her side. She was understandably terrified of an operation that was going to remove parts of her face. I came to stay again, just before the surgery, for moral support. Although the surgeons left her with only a faint scar and some damage to the inside of her mouth, she took it badly. It had a slight but noticeable effect on her diction. After all that childhood conditioning about perfection, no wonder what seemed like a miraculous recovery to her friends was nothing of the sort to her. When we spent Christmas 2007 together, she didn’t want to eat in front of me, because the damage to her mouth made eating a more ungainly process. Eventually, she began skipping eating altogether, subsisting on build-up drinks.

The story itself is bazaar and makes me think I went through life in a rather boring way, accepting my fate instead of reimagining it into a much more interesting and lucrative life. To give you the premise, the author’s uncle, Greig Mount, was from a prominent English family with a new hereditary knighthood. Greig’s wife was a flamboyant character named Betty, aka ‘Munca’. Nearing middle-age, they married in haste because both were running from things and had sharp instincts for the main chance. Munca sought refuge from a mysterious, secret past, Greig from the threat of the revelation of his true sexuality. And it worked. Rather than catching them up, their shadowy histories were miraculously suspended. Just how much more there was to this armor-clad butterfly is revealed—incrementally and irresistibly—in “Kiss Myself Goodbye: The Many Lives of Aunt Munca,” a family history so deftly excavated and winningly conjured that it restores our faith in a literary species too often given to flabbiness and self-absorption. “It is a personal memoir that turned into a quest while I wasn’t looking,” Mr. Mount explains of his decade-long exhumation of a past riddled with as many deceptions and double-crosses as any espionage novel. “In this book, nobody’s recollections are reliable,” he cautions. And isn’t that putting it mildly. Mount with Margaret Thatcher at a party in London, April 1992. Photograph: Dave Benett/Getty Images Here is where I should disclose a personal interest. Georgie was my Godmother. By that I don’t mean someone who organised an outing once a year and sent a Christmas card. I mean someone who joined my parents in loving me profoundly and taking on responsibility for my development. I didn’t expect to be mentioned in Mount’s book. I’m not important and I’m certainly not important to the story. But then, right at the end, came two scenes at which I was present.Ferdinand Mount’s Aunt Betty, or Aunt Munca as she wanted him to call her, was married to his father’s brother, Greig, who was accordingly known as Unca. The names Unca and Munca were lifted from Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Two Bad Mice: Hunca Munca, who lives beneath the floorboards, vandalises a doll’s house when she discovers that the delicious looking food on the plates is made of plaster. The book is beautifully written. The author is a complete master of words - just the right tone, just the right word, just the right cadence to a sentence to communicate sympathy, amusement, or surprise as he unfolds the amazing and fascinating story of Aunt Manca. What a story! The contemporary references to T.S. Eliot, W.E. Johns, David Dimbleby, and many other well-known people whose lives brushed hers place the story firmly in the time he is describing. And the places where the action took place are described vividly. Particularly fascinating was his description of Manca's time in Crawford Mansions where she lived below T.S. Eliot at a time when Marylebone was a slum.

I loved it, and (due to my own ignorance) had no idea of who the author was until after I had read it, and the book wasn't spoiled for the fact. Mount is one of our finest prose stylists and Kiss Myself Goodbye is a witty, moving and beautifully crafted account of one woman’s determination to live to the full. The moral of the tale is that the fabrications of a lifetime will unravel after death, especially if there happens to be an assiduous nephew to hand. Ferdinand Mount is a British gem who writes like a dream. I would probably enjoy reading a shopping list written by him. In the final three years of her life, her inclination to have guests diminished and she moved our relationship to the telephone and computer. My reliability was becoming mercurial because, like Georgie a couple of decades earlier, I’d gone into recovery from alcohol and drugs. Unlike her, I kept relapsing. It was something we were able to talk about. Georgie couldn’t tolerate AA because of what she felt was its group-think anti-intellectualism, its traces of evangelism and moral rearmament, while I found it was the only thing that had helped me join one sober day to the next.The mystery of the borrowed baby nags at Mr. Mount, as do other, seemingly related conundrums of Betty’s life: her ruthless sabotaging of Georgie’s marriage plans, the serial romances of her past, her hazy connection to her jaunty brother Buster, her real age—her real name(s), for heaven’s sake. “I had tugged the thread,” he writes of his growing curiosity, “and I could not resist following it to the end.” It is also one of the most extraordinary books I have ever read and Munca, one of the most extraordinary women I have ever had the pleasure of getting to know (albeit vicariously). I’m not sure whether she deserves a medal or a very long prison sentence but either way, I’m in awe of her. There are inevitably going to be problems with the kind of behaviour which she exhibited, not least of which is the collateral damage that is likely to be left in its wake. There are numerous potential contenders, Georgie probably being the prime candidate. You may change or cancel your subscription or trial at any time online. Simply log into Settings & Account and select "Cancel" on the right-hand side. The critics raved about this book and it appeared in a list of the top ten books of the year. So, despite having been unsure when I first read about it, on rereading the review in the top ten list I thought that it sounded like a fun read. It's written beautifully and with feeling for those involved, where there could have been a well-deserved disgust at how people have acted, there's a presence of it all happening 'in its time' and that despising the behaviour wouldn't be healthy or fair, as many of the conclusions are based on very well-researched hunches, if not actual fact. The amount of research is staggering and adds hugely to the narrative, and the results show just what can be achieved in researching your heritage - at your peril!

What Georgie had gone through had a terrible impact on her development but, like so many traumatised people, she’d found a way to transcend it. And the more she sought distance from the Mounts, the more she became herself. Because she was forced to act throughout her upbringing, some of Georgie’s natural, spontaneous reactions had disappeared. She had to make a kind of snorting noise to signify laughter. Her real laugh rarely surfaced. This was an affliction I could recognise. I'm normally not drawn to these sorts of memoirs (i.e. personal recollections about the author's wealthy family members), but Ferdinand Mount's "Kiss Myself Goodbye" is so well-written and bizarre that I stayed up late to finish the book in one sitting. It's true: Mount's mysterious Aunt Munca was a millionaire, but she was born into poverty and obtained her money by being a talented liar. Grifting those who've benefited from inherited wealth is a much more interesting story than pure nepotism. Of course, people are more complex than ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Some of the unearthed secrets partly explain why Munca was the way she was. There are moments when the reader almost roots for her as she constructs one deception after another with a dizzying panache. And although she’s driven by acquisitiveness and the desire for riches and status, she’s also propelled by a more understandable self-preservation. Less clear is why Greig would ever have been party to something that harmed a child. The life of Buster is hard to uncover, not least because a Google search brings up mainly dogs. After many false leads and dead ends, Mount finally pieces the story together: Buster Baring was married and divorced seven times, before dying in his 50s; his marriage certificates variously describe him as an electrical engineer, ­professional dancer, Grand Prix driver, manager of a joinery and cabinet works, timber merchant, farmer, author, and man “of independent means”. Did Buster know that Munca was his mother? Who did he think was his father? And who on earth were Munca’s real parents? With her proud head and hooded eyes she does indeed look, Mount thinks, like a squaw. Unca’s money comes from his firm, Lennard’s Shoes, which is a notch below Dolcis and a notch above Freeman, Hardy and Willis. Munca has breeding as well as brass: her entry in Debrett’s Baronetage describes her as “dau. of late John Anthony Baring of New York”, which is curious because she has no trace of an American accent and never once mentions her illustrious father. The anomalies in her story are noted by young Mount, who will remember her once telling him that her mother had been a lady’s maid.

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There is an interesting story here, but it’s let down by the writing. The tale of Aunt Munca is complicated enough without the author making it more confusing. The story goes off at lots of tangents and into unnecessary details, when what we really want is to build a picture of this woman who goes by many names in her lifetime. I felt like I was reading an early draft, before the book was properly streamlined and edited. For the first time, Georgie wasn’t a marionette. She began living a life that wasn’t stage-managed and set up to fail by Munca and Greig. The love of her friends enabled her to bloom as a real person. It was a time of strolling to the West End for Saturday matinees and then out for drinks, of meeting after work and convulsing into fits of laughter, of travelling and, thanks to their close proximity, being able to form an instant party of six whenever opportunity and inclination coincided. Georgie had found her family. Delightfully compulsive and unforgettably original. Mount unpeels the layers of this mysterious life with the tenacity of an experienced detective and the excitement of a fresh-eyed enthusiast. What shines through is the author’s pride and love of family and he uncovers an incredible story beautifully told. It comes over you only rarely in life: the swoony feeling that a book might almost have been written for you. Two weeks after I finished it, I can’t stop thinking about Kiss Myself Goodbye, Ferdinand Mount’s extraordinary memoir of his Aunt Munca. Like someone in love, all I want to do is talk about it, a situation that’s sorely testing the patience of my domestic colleague, who must now attend a Munca symposium at approximately 7.30pm every night. (There is only one speaker: me.)