Kiss Myself Goodbye: The Many Lives of Aunt Munca

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Aunt Munca never told the truth about anything. Calling herself after the mouse in a Beatrix Potter story, she was already a figure of mystery during the childhood of her nephew Ferdinand Mount. 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. 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. It needs a writer of wit, imagination and empathy to carry me along from one layer of the tissue to the next. Mount is such a writer. Extraordinary ... shed[s] a brilliant light on the strangeness of people's lives, the need for disguise and masquerade, the shame that drives people to act in the most peculiar ways, the ghosts that reside, unburied, within us. * Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday *

In fact, it was after 20 that Georgie came alive, having achieved a measure of separation from the Mounts. She married Claude Johnson, owner of a computer company. My parents, Meg and Hugh, were at the wedding and later introduced Georgie and Claude to another couple, the artist, Andre de Moller and his wife, June. Everyone was within walking distance in the London borough of Westminster — my parents on West Halkin Street in Belgravia, Georgie and Claude in Marylebone and Andre and June on Cadogan Square in Knightsbridge. It was the late ’60s/early ’70s and London was the most fun it had ever been. 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.” Her creative ambitions had also been suffocated to near-death by her upbringing. She was the best writer I’ve ever known, but the lethal self-doubt inculcated by Munca and Greig proved insurmountable. Sometimes, friends would build her up enough that she’d start regarding herself as competent. At some point in the ’80s, she told my mother and I about the novel she was writing. It was to be called The Social Worker. Anyone who’s ever tried it knows that the most undermining thing you can say to someone writing long-form is, ‘Have you nearly finished yet?’. So we left it to her to give us updates, but they petered out. I still wonder where that manuscript might be. And I also want to offer a different perspective. The Georgie of Mount’s book is a broken, tragic alcoholic with what Mount calls, more than once, a ‘ruined life’. It makes for gripping prose, but the Georgie I knew for 40 years was ebullient, fun-loving, bright, and cheerful. There was almost always a humorous glint in her eyes. Yes, she was complicated, but who isn’t? As a young, well-connected and sociable woman, Georgie began to catch the eye of famous men. Inexplicably, each time a union got anywhere near the altar, Munca and Greig stepped in to sabotage it. Georgie’s engagement to the journalist, David Dimbleby, was the first of these. The couple’s final stab-wound was the manner in which they let Georgie know the truth of her provenance — via documents left behind after they died. They had obviously given it great thought and decided that it was best if the truth came out once they were no longer there to answer questions.

Was he frightened of Thatcher? “You couldn’t not be frightened of her! But sometimes, she would annoy you into being a bit braver, and you’d say: ‘Well, I really wonder if that is true, prime minister.’” If he sounds a bit like Sir Humphrey in Yes, Minister, he is also able to see how things must sometimes have felt from her side. “The snobbery [Thatcher was, famously, the daughter of a grocer] was quite startling, stretching all the way from Christopher Soames [the Conservative cabinet minister] to Jonathan Miller [the theatre director]; the use of suburban as the ultimate insult, combined with sexism of a kind which even then seemed out of date.” When I was 21, I came out to her by letter. I was terrified. I had been deeply wounded by being outed at school, twice. I was part of the Section 28 generation, unable to go to any authority figure with my worries about being gay in a country that openly hated gay people. Under Margaret Thatcher, the gay liberation gains made in the ’70s were gradually reversed, to the point where the government and the newspapers that supported it were starting to agitate for the re-criminalisation of homosexuality. After I was outed at 16, with disastrous consequences, every self-preserving fibre in me rallied and I ‘inned’ myself permanently so as to survive. 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. 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? 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.

From the moment of my birth in 1974 until her death, Georgie was the person to whom I was closest, after my parents. It was Georgie my father called from Westminster Hospital in 1974, to say, ‘You’re a Godmother’. Georgie dashed from Victoria to be at my mother’s bedside, meeting me when I was three hours old. When we moved from central London to Fulham, in search of more space, Georgie and Claude followed. One of my earliest memories is of Georgie arriving at our house. I can’t have been more than three or four. “Look who’s here,” I remember my mother saying. “It’s Georgie, your Godmother.”“Georgie’s not my Godmother,” I said, quite confidently. “She’s my friend.” I didn’t yet understand that people could be more than one thing and if it was a choice between ‘godmother’ and ‘friend’, then Georgie was ‘friend’. I think she realised in that moment that she’d been subtly upgraded because she never forgot it, recalling it right up to the weeks before her death. A few things drew me to this book. First of all it was the intrigue behind the author's Aunt Munca, not just the fact that she used the name of a Beatrix Potter mouse but also the fact she was quite a mysterious figure for him. He grew up spending quite a lot of time around her but never really felt that he knew her fully. Felix Torres on Law firms are throwing legal spaghetti at the wall to take down gen-AI, but judges are so far unimpressed 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.

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Kiss Myself Goodbye is the name of a song the author remembers from a trip to a nightclub with his Aunt Munca but it's also remarkably fitting as Munca spent her lifetime kissing her real self goodbye and reinventing herself. They often say the truth is stranger than fiction and that's definitely true of Munca's life. But his evocation of it is beautiful and faultless. Its singular topography stirs him; he grasps that, more than most cities, it is a collection of villages; he has such feeling for its hulking chapels, crumbling steel mills and working poor. Closing the book, I wondered all over again why anyone would want to apply identity politics to the writing of literature – a good writer can go anywhere – and then I sent its author an embarrassing fan letter in which I detailed various Cooke family locations (girl guide hut, pub, Granny’s outside loo) and their precise relationship to places in his narrative. Possibly alarmed by my ardent tone, he replied by return. Which is how I came to know that, unlike me, Munca did not maintain her flat vowels after the rest of her moved south. Older women on film 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.) Extraordinary … shed[s] a brilliant light on the strangeness of people’s lives, the need for disguise and masquerade, the shame that drives people to act in the most peculiar ways, the ghosts that reside, unburied, within us.