Wind in My Hair by Josephine Loewenstein

Nicky Haslam

Wind in My Hair

One can imagine oneself in Josephine Loewenstein’s comfortably stylish sitting room. Curtains of old glazed chintz are pulled against the darkling riverbank nearby, flames curl round sweet-scented logs in the fireplace. A cushioned sofa contours weary limbs, light falls over your left shoulder, there’s a handy

low table for your cuppa. Josephine is on the telephone, laughing with a friend; your eyes might glance up from the Evening Standard and see an open photograph album. ‘May I look?’ ‘Of course you can, but that’s the newest one, all grandchildren … you know … skiing holidays, and Mustique, anniversaries, bits and pieces taken here, terribly dull I’m afraid...’

Well it isn’t, and that’s because Josephine supplies an illuminating and drily funny commentary to every page. Hours – by now the cuppa’s been replaced, and quite often, by something stronger – and many more albums and scrapbooks later, you will have learned from, laughed with, and listened to, the distinguished past of the author of this book. For, in essence, it is a discreetly personal commentary on a long life, told with poise and uniquely illustrated, leaving one wanting more of both.

You will learn, for instance, something of her beautiful, chic, but wildly eccentric mother, and her distant – until years after – father. Of a childhood spent with aged grandparents in grandish houses, the rooms and furnishings vividly remembered, as are such pressing pre-war problems as finding butlers of an acceptable height, or there not being a man to pick the peaches. Of her determination, despite an early sign of osteoporosis, to join the fledging Royal Ballet, and thus dancing at the post-war re-opening Gala of the Opera House, with the king and queen watching; or that she auditioned for, and was offered, a leading role at the London Palladium. (She turned it down. ‘I didn’t want to be a show-girl’, she writes, tout court.) Of a young year in Rome, then approaching its most dolce of vitas, though the Black Nobility, created by the Papacy, remained loyal to the Vatican and barely acknowledged the White.

Of her marriage to the merchant banker Rupert Loewenstein, who, thanks to an early introduction by Christopher Gibbs, made a fortune for the Rolling Stones, she has no need to elaborate, as he himself wrote wittily of his life and lineage, but instead describes (and illustrates) places, parties and people of the passing parade they shared. There is also an intriguing chapter on a mysterious Israeli friend, which in tone and detached amusement reads like parts of Some People by Harold Nicolson. She is candid about her bouts of depression, her frequent pain, her time as a magistrate, her dislike of a (very) few people, her pride in her priestly sons and her enchanting and capable daughter, who share Josephine’s deep delight in her gaily decorated house in Mustique, where she has been every year since its inception by her friends Colin and Anne Tennant, and thus knows every foible, and fable, of that fantasy island.

It’s late, the fire’s burned low now, the bottle almost empty, the sofa cushions in disarray. But maybe, all this time, one wasn’t really there, not turning the pages of albums, but simply reading Josephine’s book, and hearing her voice bringing her story to life. Hatchards price: £18