Kiss Myself Goodbye
by Ferdinand Mount Bloomsbury 272pp £20 The Week Bookshop £15.99
In this “unusual and beautifully written book”, Ferdinand Mount tells the story of his exotic, charismatic and mysterious Aunt Munca, said Roland White in The Sunday Times. Betty, as she mostly called herself (Munca was a nickname derived from Beatrix Potter’s “bad” mouse, Hunca Munca), was the wife of Mount’s paternal uncle Greig (known as Unca). As a boy, Mount often spent holidays with these “raffish relatives” (pictured), who owned a Rolls and a Mercedes, kept a permanent suite at Claridge’s (which they called “The Pub”), and hobnobbed with Diana Dors and Nanette Newman. But he became aware that his aunt was not all she seemed. Details about her past didn’t add up; there were rumours that her brother, Buster, was, in fact, her son. Decades later, long after her death, Mount set about discovering who she really was – an investigation which led him to conclude that she “never told the truth about anything”.
Mount’s quest to uncover his aunt’s identity is painstaking, said Claire Lowdon in The Spectator. But the results are “genuinely incredible”. He learns that Munca wasn’t the daughter of the “late John Anthony Baring of New York” (as she was listed in Debrett’s).
She didn’t grow up in the Philippines, as she claimed; she was born in Sheffield, to teenage parents. She herself became a mother at 16, worked as a typist, and went on to have three bigamous marriages. Even her name was a lie: she was actually called Eileen. As he fleshes out the details of her life, Mount provides, along the way, a “generous, eclectic history of the early 20th century” – with excursions into topics such as motor racing and the RAF. It all adds up to “the most gripping book I’ve seen all year. I laughed. I gasped. I read it so greedily that I had to force myself to slow down towards the end.”
And you emerge from it sneakily admiring Aunt Munca, who, if nothing else, tried to “live life to the full”, said Frances Wilson in The Daily Telegraph. Nonetheless, her deceit profoundly damaged others – most tragically her adopted daughter, Georgie, who, like Estella in Great Expectations, was “raised to drive men to distraction”. Her suitors included Max Hastings and Norman Lamont. Aged 20, she became engaged to Mount’s friend David Dimbleby, but Aunt Munca scuppered the union (Mount suspects because she feared the journalist would discover her lies). After that, Georgie moved abroad, and never married. Witty, moving and beautifully crafted, Kiss Myself Goodbye is a “masterclass” in bringing long-buried secrets to light.