Charley was born with a drawerful of silver spoons in his mouth

MEMOIR

CHARLEY'S WOODS   

by Charles Duff (Zuleika £9.99 272 pp) 

How about this for an arresting opening sentence? ‘My mother’s lover, a one-time actress called Audrey Carten . . .’

This is a family memoir out of the ordinary. Charles Duff, or Charley, seemed to be born with a drawerful of silver spoons in his mouth. His father was Sir Michael Duff, Queen Mary’s godson and Lord Lieutenant of Caernarvonshire, while his mother, Lady Caroline Paget, was the eldest daughter of the Marquess of Anglesey.

He grew up at the family’s 18th-century country house — Vaynol, in North Wales — surrounded by servants, royals and socialites. Photographer Cecil Beaton was a regular visitor and Princess Margaret would land a helicopter on the lawn — from where you could see Mount Snowdon, which lay on the family estate.

Charles Duff (pictured with his mother, Lady Caroline Paget) who was adopted as a baby recounts his upbringing in North Wales in a fascinating memoir 

Sir Michael was disappointed that Princess Margaret’s future husband, Antony Armstrong-Jones, his godson — yes, everyone in this book is improbably well-connected — chose to name his earldom after the mountain without asking his permission.

Despite, or perhaps because of, his aristocratic upbringing, Charles’s home life was, in his own words, ‘unconventional, wild, sexualised and superficial’.

His bisexual mother was just 21 when she embarked on her relationship with Audrey Carten (13 years her senior), after a brief fling with the American actress Tallulah Bankhead.

Described by her aunt Diana Cooper as ‘a dream of physical beauty . . . classic long legs’, Lady Caroline continued to have affairs with men, including her uncle Duff Cooper and the artist Rex Whistler.

But, after falling pregnant at 36, she urgently needed a husband.

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An arranged marriage followed with Michael Duff. They were ill-suited — he had a stammer, was a half-wit and gay — but he liked the idea of marrying a marquess’s daughter, needed an heir and he hoped more children might follow. No wonder Isaiah Berlin called it ‘a very peculiar marriage’.

Sir Michael kept a boyfriend in London — The Observer gossip columnist Edward Mace — and liked to dress up as Queen Mary as a comic turn.

Once, while staying at a friend’s house, he was in royal drag when the real queen arrived, prompting a hasty change of clothes.

The author sought refuge from this cross-dressing mayhem by taking solitary walks in the nearby woods.

The highly unusual domestic set-up provoked endless speculation among his parents’ friends about Charles’s true paternity.

Charles (pictured) details his parents lives being fueled by alcohol, sex abuse and drugs. He remembers wondering why his father wanted him dead 

For years, it was thought he might have been the son of Sir Anthony Eden, another of Caroline’s conquests, who mistakenly believed he was the father.

Another suspect was conductor Sir Malcolm Sargent. There was even an outlandish theory that he was the secret son of Princess Margaret and Group Captain Peter Townsend. (Duff didn’t hear these rumours until after his parents’ deaths).

The startling, heart-stopping twist in this extraordinary tale is that Charles was not high-born at all, but was adopted as a baby by Caroline ten days after she had a miscarriage.

‘I was the understudy for the baby who died,’ he remarks, ruefully. No more children followed.

It makes for a moving and compelling story of a foundling growing up in an alien world and follows his restless quest for a sense of belonging.

7 miles 

The length of the boundary wall around Vaynol estate

Duff captures the heartlessness, cruelty and capriciousness of the upper classes and some vignettes are worthy of Evelyn Waugh. Duff never got on with his father and earned his lifelong hatred.

As a boy, he remembers wondering, ‘with a gut-twist of shock and misery, “why does this man want me dead?” ’ His mother talked about ‘sacking’ him as her son six months before she died.

Of course, his parents were damaged in their turn, and Duff gives a vivid account of their lives curtailed by alcohol, sex abuse, drugs and indolence. In adulthood, he succumbed to alcoholism himself and ends up in a drying-out clinic.

Despite all the trauma he has experienced, he tells his story with humour and takes us on an entertaining ramble through his rackety life. After leaving Bryanston School at 16, he is sent by his mother to Tangier — ‘the gay capital and drug centre of the world’ — under the ‘watchful’ eye of his aunt, Veronica Tennant, and godfather, David Herbert, who both lived there.

Charles (pictured as a child with his mother) never met his real father and discovered that his birth mother died of a brain haemorrhage aged 42

He is seduced by the playwright Joe Orton in a locker room on the beach, smokes joints with William Burroughs, the author of Naked Lunch, and, years later, seduces Nicholas Eden, son of Sir Anthony and, therefore, his putative brother. ‘I had a lot of sex in the Seventies, some sober, most drunken, but no real love affairs,’ he says.

As if his paternal relations weren’t bad enough, Sir Michael tries to seduce one of Charles’s boyfriends.

Charles enrols as a drama student at the Bristol Old Vic — in the year below Jeremy Irons and Tim Pigott-Smith — and later becomes a successful lecturer in theatre studies.

Duff is very acute, be it on the bitchy, parochial, self-regarding expatriate community of Tangier (dubbed ‘Cheltenham in the sun’ by Beaton) or the shallowness of the aristocracy (‘too many of these people put on silly fancy dress because they had no true individuality’).

He also offers some splendid pen portraits.

CHARLEY'S WOODS by Charles Duff (Zuleika £9.99 272 pp)

My favourite? His beloved great-aunt Diana Cooper, with whom he lodged in London in exchange for alcohol, was wont to lie in bed all day with her chihuahuas, in pink nylon sheets. ‘They never need ironing,’ she trilled.

On his parents’ death, Vaynol was left to his cousin, Andrew Tennant, as the law at the time forbade adopted children from inheriting.

As a result, Charles felt robbed twice over — deprived of his real parents and of his childhood home. A reconciliation with his birth family offers some consolation.

Charles discovers that his real mother was Irene, a social worker and therapist in Ireland who died of a brain haemorrhage aged 42. He never met her or his real father, but did make contact with his cousins.

The superlatives tend to pile up in the book (‘the most glorious production, to this day, I have ever seen’), as do the entitled toffs.

But there is no denying it is a fascinating read and, happily, he does find contentment.

His adopted father’s final words to him form a fitting epitaph to the book: ‘There is a lot wrong with the world and there is nothing you or I can do about it.’

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