Mother’s heart was carved from granite
I would be left for days on end with the hounds
Her ‘pride and joy’ was her new car, not me
It’s a story of childhood neglect like no other. How RORY KNIGHT BRUCE was abandoned in a Devon hedge as a toddler by his high society mother who then bolted to London. She wed four times and became one of the first women TV stars. Only now is Rory realising how emotionally scarred she left him
MY MOTHER Gwynneth Tighe was the It-girl of her day. The youngest of two daughters from a grand Anglo -Irish family, she was impossibly beautiful, incurably romantic, had porcelain skin, a willing smile and was a model as well as Debutante of the Year. But when it came to her children, her heart seemed to have been carved from granite.
She abandoned me when I was two, leaving me in a hedgerow on the back lane of our Devon farm in the company of a farm worker who held my newly orphaned little hand as she took a taxi to Taunton railway station.
She whisked herself away to a giddy life in London as an aspiring actress and television presenter, leaving me to be looked after by a succession of foreign au pairs whose hearts were never in it. They were interested in my father, though. As a neighbour later remarked: ‘They did more than the Hoovering for him.’
Of course, I was too young to take this in. The next time I saw my mother was a few years later when she popped up on the black -andwhite television in the front room of our farmhouse. By now, she was a daytime quiz-show host, a sort of early Carol Vorderman, on a BBC programme called Pit Y our Wits. My father called me into the drawing room, pointed at the screen and said: ‘That’s your mother.’
The feeling of being abandoned by her has never left me. It has made me cautious, full of mistrust, given me a desolate fear of human betrayal and a cynical attitude to close friendships.
I can ’ t really forgive her for leaving me. Years later, I overheard her talking about my father to a lunch guest. ‘I left him because he was a monster,’ she said. ‘So you left a two-year-old with a monster?’ the guest asked, somewhat uncomprehending. ‘Would you say, then, that your son was a bit of an inconvenience?’ the guest continued.
My ear cocked at this. ‘Y eah, Baby,’ she replied in a mock
American drawl, leaning back on her chair and extinguishing her cigarette in the butter dish.
I used to think that her lack of interest in her children had not really affected me. But that was before I started writing my memoirs and looking back at her life. It was an irony that, in her TV persona, critics remarked how many children wrote letters to her. ‘She loved children,’ they observed. Well, providing they were on the other side of the television set.
Having deserted me and my elder brother Robin and my father , she went on to marry three more times, including a film producer , a White Russian prince and an East End public relations smoothie. She drove smart cars, mixed with celebrities and royalty; she was an adornment to the highest circles of social and fashionable London in the ‘Swinging Sixties’, hanging out with Roger Moore, Eamonn Andrews and other television stars.
My father was not really kitted out for full-time parenthood. He was given to a splenetic temper , brooding silences and drank prodigiously. The pair of them really should never have married.
He was a damaged war hero and gentleman farmer with a sizeable Devon estate who hunted with foxhounds. She was just 19 while he was 34. They had little in common. Perhaps he simply reminded her of her own father, who was a group captain in the RAF.
At their wedding, in the fashionable Catholic church in Farm Street, Mayfair, Antony Armstrong - Jones — later Lord Snowdon and P rincess Margaret’s husband — took the photographs. Afterwards, mother moved to Devon, to the farm where I now live, to become part of the county set, which bored her stiff. She played the role convincingly for three years before ordering that taxi. She was what in those days was called a ‘bolter’.
Once she had disappeared from our lives, it fell to me to be brought up by farm workers and the kennelman who looked after the hounds some miles away. My father was only too happy to leave me with them while he concentrated his attention on the young au pairs.
I had my own special canine childhood companion — a Jack Russell puppy given to me by my father named Ciboli (after Cibola, the village that harboured him from the enemy in wartime Italy). I have kept a terrier by me ever since, a comfort in the unsettled world of humans.
During holidays, I would be left for days on end with the hounds and my terrier . We would often sleep on their straw beds, although the hounds were much bigger than both of us. On Sundays, the kennelman would boil tripe from the innards of sheep for the hounds, and we would get to eat it, too. My father drew the line one day when he caught me eating dog biscuits with Ciboli.
It may sound strange, but those were some of the happiest days of my life. Me, Ciboli, the hounds — we all thought of ourselves as one big family. When the huntsman woke us up — always at 6.30am on the dot — the hounds were let out into their runs and I was given a job to do, sweeping or tidying the kennels.
Like the hounds and Ciboli, I became used to the routine and would have been lost without it. When I moaned about the tasks, I was ignored.
And soon enough, the dogs and I came to understand there was little to be gained by whining . If I did something well, the kennelman would give me a biscuit (no, not a dog biscuit) and I would savour the reward.
In term time I walked to the village school two miles away, there and back, most days on my own. Over the packhorse bridge, past the pub and up a steep hill. Because I spent so much time in the kennels, the children there called me Mowgli after the orphaned character in The Jungle Book.
Then, one morning , my mother suddenly made a physical reappearance, swooping down from her glamorous London life on television. I would have been six or seven.
She came unannounced into my bedroom in the farmhouse and engulfed me with the scent of gin and fags and a stranger’s embrace.
Later that day, at her request I washed her car, a Ford Zephyr Six, black with a square bonnet, then rushed back to the house to tell her I had finished. I found my parents were in bed together . Nothing out of the ordinary , you might think . Only, by then they had been divorced for several years and my mother had married husband No 2, the film producer.
From then on, she played a more active role in my life. She began having me to stay in London and would send extravagant, bemusing presents. When I had my tonsils out, it was a Moulton bicycle, fine for the smooth streets of Mayfair , not so handy on muddy Devon lanes. At Christmas it was a Fortnum hamper which I shared with my terrier.
I followed her career and succes - sive marriages through the gossip columns of newspapers. You might say that my mother was an early pioneer in the 1960s world of maledominated television. Her fame and earnings brought her instant recognition on the streets and corner shops of Chiswick in W est London, where she lived with the second husband; she had a pink Cadillac parked outside and a speed boat on the Thames.
Once, when I was staying with her in London, The Beatles were filming scenes for A Hard Day’s Night in the pub next door . My mum got to meet Ringo and I got to stroke a live lion, which was wheeled on as an extra.
I remember going with her when she turned on the Christmas lights in Newport P agnell in Bucking - hamshire, where she had a week - end cottage. I was ushered away by a security guard — she did
nothing to stop it happening — just as I was ushered away by her successive husbands.
Her third was a White R ussian prince with whom she lived in a large South K ensington townhouse, employing both a butler and a maid. She now styled herself ‘Princess Elizabeth Galitzine’ — her first name Gwynneth didn ’t have the royal ring she wanted, so she used her middle name.
By this time, I had been moved to a private boarding school and would queue for hours at the school’s single telephone cubicle to ring ‘ home’. ‘I will see if the Princess is free,’ came the reply . Frequently, she was not.
School visits were rare and caused something of a commotion when they did occur . I was certainly not my mother’s ‘pride and joy’. That was her new car , a sloop- backed, bottle- green, Bentley S2 Continental.
Once, she appeared unannounced at school as I was quite happily going out to Sunday lunch with a friend and his normal family.
‘How could you be so disloyal?’ she screamed at me, as she tugged me out of my friend’s parents’ Ford Fiesta.
On the side of her car she had installed the crest of her R ussian husband. One day, while parked outside her London house, some hooligans had scratched out the royal crest and, for good measure, scrawled ‘F*** Off’. It was into the drawing room for me, for another ritual carpeting.
‘Which of your friends doesn ’t like me?’ she began.
It seemed pointless to suggest that I had nothing to do with it and that such heraldic vulgarity was not to everyone’s taste.
Another time, having been caught riding a moped down the King’s Road in London without a licence aged 16, I was picked up by the police. Thinking no more about it, I went off to a party for the weekend at the Oxfordshire home of one of my mother’s wealthy friends, the chairman of London brokers Cazenove.
I should have heard the alarm bells when, on the Monday morning, I was escorted to my host’s helicopter and flown back to a heliport in Battersea, South-West London, under adult guard. Into the drawing room again. ‘You have brought disgrace upon the family ,’ my mother began. To be fair to her she was, at the time, presenting a crime show called Police 5.
Just before my O - levels, the White Russian prince came to see me at school to announce his departure and their impending divorce. ‘ I have had enough,’ he said.
‘She is like Cruella de Vil.’ With my mother’s change to husband No 4 — in 1978, she married a good-looking East End public relations man, at 40, her own age — came a change of religion. She moved to Israel having embraced Zionism and it was there that her lifestyle f finally caught up with her . She w went broke.
I still have the receipts for the hotels and restaurants she visited — the most costly in Europe, the best rooms, no expense spared. And so she returned to her native I Ireland with her husband and t there saw out her days, penniless, m making jam for a living. Even then, the family crest had to appear on the jars.
Her behaviour is partly the reason it took me so long to settle down — throughout my 20s and 30s I could not shake a deep fear that I would be abandoned again. When I eventually did get married,
‘She’s like Cruella de Vil,’ said her third husband
I asked my mother to come to the wedding: ‘I would love to, darling,’ she replied, ‘but it’s the raspberrypicking season.’
My mother lived her life in the way she wanted. She was head - strong and career -minded long before the women ’s movement made it acceptable to behave in such a way. For that I admire her greatly. The introduction she gave me to the media and the social scene undoubtedly helped shape my career as a journalist.
But what I can never excuse is the way she abandoned me, with no thought of the consequences. It was an act of selfishness that as a parent now myself, I struggle to comprehend.
It was as if she had wanted to instil in me an inability to trust or love others.
There is nothing quaint or oldfashioned about that.
Before she died, aged 84, in an Irish old people’s home (she had managed to wangle the best room and got the State to pay the £4,000 monthly bill), I took my young daughter to see her.
She gave my daughter a pearlchoker necklace, the one she would have worn in the heyday of her 1960s fame. ‘ Thank you, Granny,’ said my child, to which her grandmother replied at their one and only meeting: ‘A granny is a knot. Y ou must never call me that. You must call me Elizabeth.’
And with that remonstration, we left her , a little sad, and certainly bemused.