The duchess, p.30
The Duchess, page 30
Catherine Goodman was the tour artist when they went to India in November 2013 en route for the Commonwealth heads of government meeting in Sri Lanka. ‘That was rather poignant in some ways,’ she says, ‘because Mark Shand came and joined us. He was such a force of nature, such a lovely person, and also quite anarchic, and so I think Camilla was always a bit nervous that he was going to do something.’
The issue was the loss of the wild elephants’ migratory routes. As Mark told the London Evening Standard, ‘They might only be a quarter of a kilometre wide, but the elephants have been using them for thousands of years and they won’t veer off them. That means if there’s human habitation in the way, they’ll just go through it … But that’s a battle – between humans and elephants – that of course the animals won’t in the end win.’ The Elephant Family, the charity Mark co-founded in 2002, had spent £1 million on a single route in Kerala, and needed £50–£70 million to maintain them all.
So when the royal party were in Kerala, Mark took his brother-in-law to the jungle near Kochi in the hope of seeing some elephants. It was a futile and frustrating trip. They drove for two and a half hours, and when they arrived at the remote watering hole, there was nothing to be seen but hundreds of local police and troops drafted in to secure the area. What’s more, it was pouring with rain, so they were drenched. ‘On every other occasion in my life that I’ve gone to these things it’s the same – it’s the security that ruins everything,’ said the Prince tetchily. ‘It’s Murphy’s Law. Everybody always says, “The day before people saw God knows what.”’
In the run-up to Prince William’s marriage to Kate Middleton in 2011, the tabloids made much of a rather wayward uncle on her mother’s side. Gary Goldsmith, a self-made millionaire, lived a colourful life on the island of Ibiza. He was caught in a News of the World sting cutting lines of cocaine at his house, La Maison de Bang Bang, and was repeatedly referred to as the black sheep of the family. Despite the publicity and the tattoos and the shaven head, Gary was invited to the wedding and said afterwards that Camilla was the one who had gone out of her way to welcome him. ‘Camilla made a beeline for me,’ he said. He plucked up the courage to say, ‘I’m sorry for the bad press.’ She simply smiled and said, ‘Don’t think twice about it. I get the same myself.’ Gary is full of admiration: ‘She was beyond amazing.’
Camilla and Annabel used to joke that Mark was their very own ‘Casa Bang Bang’. He was no millionaire but he was unpredictable, as he was the first to admit, and although he had calmed down a lot in recent years, he told the Standard he was itching to go AWOL again. ‘Don McCullin rings me up and growls, “Where are we off to, then?” But now, the elephants are my priority.’
Mark died at the end of an evening in which he had raised $1.7 million dollars for his beloved elephants. After the outstanding success of the Fabergé Big Egg Hunt in London in the spring of 2012 – when 200 two-foot-six-high fibreglass eggs, decorated by well-known artists and designers were placed all over the capital, including a Humpty Dumpty one which sat on the wall of Clarence House – he had launched the Fabergé Big Egg Hunt in New York. On 22 April 2014, thirty-six of them were being auctioned at Sotheby’s in Manhattan. The main auction room had been packed with VIP collectors and celebrities who paid higher and higher prices – the highest was $900,000 for an egg decorated by the American artist Jeff Koons. And there were still 250 eggs to be sold by auction online. When it was all over, a triumphant Mark and about a dozen friends went to burger restaurant J. G. Melon, before heading to the official after-party at the Diamond Horseshoe nightclub. In the early hours, Mark and his creative director, 28-year-old Lexi Bowes-Lyon, went on to the Rose Bar in the Gramercy Park Hotel. They had a few drinks and danced to the Rolling Stones.
After about half an hour, they went out into the street for a cigarette. On the way back in, Mark motioned for Lexi to go through the door ahead of him, lost his balance and fell backwards, hitting the back of his head on the pavement. He lay there motionless and unconscious. At Bellevue Hospital he went straight to intensive care and was put on life support. Camilla was in Scotland with Charles when she heard the news. She immediately rang Tom and said, ‘Mark’s hit his head on the pavement. They’re saying he’s not going to make it.’ Annabel spoke to the neurologist, who said, ‘Your brother is 99.5 per cent brain dead.’
Mark and Clio were divorced by now, so nineteen-year-old Ayesha was legally his next of kin, but she wasn’t left to make the decision on her own. Everyone hurriedly gathered at her cousin Kate Elliot’s house and said to Ayesha, ‘This is your father. This is your decision. But you know as well as we do that the idea of Mark as a vegetable – no way.’ She agreed immediately. ‘She was adamant and she was right.’ So it was left to Annabel to call the neurologist at Bellevue and tell him to turn off the machines. ‘That was the most horrible thing I’ve ever had to do,’ she told Bob Colacello of Vanity Fair. Mark was pronounced dead at twenty-five minutes past eleven on 23 April. He had undeniably been drinking, but a post-mortem revealed that his skull had been unusually thin in places. Had it been thicker he may have survived.
The whole family was devastated. Camilla found it particularly difficult. She had never been as close to Mark as Annabel, but since her marriage to Charles they had made up for lost time. The Prince loved Mark, loved his madcap stories and his passion for travel and for India and for elephants. And he loved having him to stay at Birkhall, where he’d leap into lochs and swim across them. Their fondness for one another had brought Camilla closer to her brother, but Mark had said, ruefully, about a year before his death, that he had never once in his life had lunch or tea with Camilla by himself. And as in many families, there were difficulties between the sisters in the arrangements for his funeral. Camilla felt that Annabel was taking over again – she had felt the same way when their father died. But it was natural that Annabel should: both men had lived with her for some years before they died and she had looked after them. Mark’s life had been difficult in the last few years and he had suffered from terrible depressions.
The funeral was again held at the church in Stourpaine, and afterwards at Annabel’s house, where Mark had left in the garden an elephant made of wire and covered in ivy, and which they dressed up for the occasion. It was an intimate service with just family and close friends, with moving tributes, readings and beautiful music. Ben Elliot had asked talented tenor Hal Cazalet – grandson of the racehorse trainer Peter Cazalet – to sing a couple of songs. He and his wife lived in Dorset, but he had grown up at the other end of Plumpton Lane from The Laines. One of the songs Ben had asked him to sing was ‘Wild World’ by Cat Stevens, which Mark had loved and always used to sing with Ayesha. After he had put down the phone, Hal thought, I shouldn’t be singing ‘Wild World’; Cat Stevens should. So he rang back and suggested Ben try and get hold of the singer, who now lives in America. Now known as Yusuf Islam, he flew in specially; midway through the service, with no announcement, the Sixties legend slowly walked up the aisle from the back of the church with an acoustic guitar, singing his hit, which had been Mark’s song. There wasn’t a dry eye in the place.
Tom wrote a moving tribute to his uncle in the Daily Mail:
Uncle Mark is dead. Four words I never thought I’d write. It never even crossed my mind that Mark would cease to be.
Idiotic, I know, but such was the raw power of his personality, the blinding glare of his charm, the sheer force and magnetism of his character, that I never imagined life without him. None of us did. Other people die. Normal folk expire. Not Mark.
Death is for pencil-pushers, bank managers and pompous golf club bores. But now he’s gone. Ripped from our grasp. Way before his time.
Because here was a man who’d brushed off cyclones, tsunamis, earthquakes, shipwrecks, pirates, bandits and malaria. An adventurer who relished nothing more than an old-fashioned punch-up in a torrid Jakartan dive; a dashing buccaneer who would have been dismissed by John Buchan as too far-fetched; a best-selling travel writer; and a conservationist renowned for his single-minded mission to save the Asian elephant.
He would have relished the irony of his demise. Not by poisoned arrow, or furious bull elephant in musth, rather the cold, hard, mundane pavement of the New York night.
And with Mark gone came the stark realisation that Camilla and Annabel were on their own and needed one another more than ever.
39
WOW
Jude Kelly is a most remarkable individual. She’s not tall, but you wouldn’t miss her in a crowd. She has her own funky style of dress and her hair (on the occasions I’ve met her) is a striking mixture of dark and platinum. She is a feminist, she has a heart of gold, and she is artistic director of the Southbank Centre in London, which incorporates twenty-one acres of concert halls – including the Royal Festival Hall – galleries, cafés, restaurants and open spaces. ‘My grandmother left school when she was twelve, my mother left school when she was fifteen, and here am I,’ she says, ‘a girl from Liverpool in charge of one of Britain’s biggest cultural institutions. Fifty years ago that wouldn’t have been possible for a woman or somebody of my background. I might have some talent but that’s not the story. The story is the opportunity and I thought I shouldn’t be a leader as a woman unless I was going to use the platform.’
And so it was that I found myself a guest at Clarence House, in a room full of very different but all very remarkable women, including Theresa May, then Home Secretary, now Prime Minister. For the last few years Camilla has been president of WOW – Women of the World – the organisation Jude founded in 2010. And every year the Duchess hosts a lunch during the WOW festival at the Southbank. WOW grew out of Jude’s frustration that despite decades of feminism, there is still profound inequality between men and women, which is not only ‘a crazy waste of human potential’ but a potential cause of violence against women.
As Jude explains, these are neither conferences nor symposiums. They are a chance to explore all kinds of ideas and subjects and meet women from many different backgrounds. They’re an opportunity for people to draw attention to stories that are uncomfortable and difficult, as well as those that are triumphant but little publicised. There’s music and poetry and dancing, and it’s all a lot of fun.
‘It’s been overwhelmingly exciting,’ she says. ‘I was excited by thinking, do I dare? Feminism is supposedly not needed any more, do I dare create something which says the story’s not finished?’
WOW has made a huge impact. In the first year, for example, they gave a platform to Leyla Hussein and Nimko Ali, both survivors of female genital mutilation. Nimko spoke. ‘It was a fifteen-minute talk by a very inexperienced young woman, and the response was massive and that support led them to start The Daughters of Eve.’ That’s the charity that campaigns against FGM all over the world. ‘She always says this happened because of WOW.
‘WOW is very much an opportunity for people to enter at lots of different levels of experience; not everybody wants to start off with “What are we going to do about rape as a weapon of war?” It can be as simple as coming to one of the market stalls where they’re doing braiding and hair care and talking about alopecia or recovering after chemo, or women’s huge anxiety about going grey. I’m very keen that we don’t police each other’s language or tell each other how we ought to think about things, but I also think it’s great to understand more than we do.
‘My call to action is “Look, there are many things you will have seen and read and encountered during this festival and a lot of it springs from a society that is not yet confident that women are equal, or should be equal, or could ever be equal, but what would you like to do about that fact? Do you want to go home and readdress a few things in your own life? Do you want to help the victims of domestic violence?” My call is “Do something and change your language. Don’t keep implying that there’s nothing wrong, because the evidence is against that. Your life might seem perfectly adjusted and balanced, and we all operate so that we can live happily if we can, and we negotiate things and we’re complicit in things and internalise things, otherwise we’d go mad. But how will you help make change happen?”’
Jude never set out to have a royal president for WOW. It was another serendipitous consequence of Camilla’s appearance at the Orange Prize presentation at the Royal Festival Hall in 2010. ‘Because I’m the artistic director here I welcomed her and we started chatting, and I instantly realised that she had read all the books. I’m not being disparaging about VIPs but often, for a number of reasons, they haven’t done that, they have been given a text, but she had read the books and it was really interesting to watch her warmth, her engagement with the women authors that she talked to. She wasn’t interested in being in the limelight, she didn’t require status, she was very informal, self-deprecating in a jolly, humorous way and I liked her straight away.’
The upshot was the first of the lunchtime receptions at Clarence House, to which Jude was free to invite anyone she chose. ‘It was a really great affair. She was unafraid to go and talk in depth about FGM.’
The Duchess has since been involved in supporting WOW groups around the world – they have now been established in fifteen countries, and by 2018 it’s hoped they’ll be in all fifty-three Commonwealth countries too – and in 2015, on WOW’s fifth anniversary, she became president. ‘Supporting the achievements of women – in all walks of life – is hugely important,’ she said, ‘and WOW plays a vital role in bringing the right people together. It takes a frank look at the obstacles that prevent women and girls from reaching their potential and provides a platform for discussions of issues that really matter.’
‘People go away from those lunches feeling really respected,’ says Jude, ‘and they feel the warmth of her personality. She’s lived her life and she’s had to live some of it in public, and that’s got a deeply painful aspect to it – and she’s obviously transferred whatever difficulties she’s had into a greater compassion for others. You can see that’s what she does with it. Navigating that can’t have been easy.’
40
Making a Difference
Finding Rape Crisis South London, in Croydon, is not easy. The building is an old bank in a pretty run-down part of the town, with traffic thundering past, and there is nothing outside to indicate you’ve arrived. This is deliberate. Not even the neighbours know what goes on behind the solid front doors. All they know is that women of all ages, all shapes and sizes, all ethnicities, come and go from it all day long. It is not a drop-in centre. Those women are here by appointment. They have all been raped or subjected to sexual violence – some of them recently, some of them historically, as children, by relatives, neighbours, people in positions of trust. They are all traumatised.
Inside it’s surprisingly warm and comfortable. It’s not like a medical centre or a hospital, it’s like going into someone’s living room. There’s a big sofa to sit on, a coffee table with magazines on it and flowers, art work on the walls, and something feels indefinably safe here. It takes Yvonne Traynor, the remarkable woman who has been running it for the last twenty years, to explain what I’m feeling. It’s the colour of the walls: they are painted terracotta, ‘Because it was the only colour that survivors of the Holocaust felt comfortable sitting in when they were rescued.
‘Survivors of sexual violence feel a huge amount of shame because this is violence against your whole being, against not only your external body but also the inside of your body. It’s both external trauma and internal trauma, so it affects your spirituality, your self-worth, your self-esteem. It affects your sense of safety in this world, because most women are raped by men that they know, whether they’ve known them briefly or whether it’s someone they had come to trust, people they had made an evaluation about.
‘Sexual violence isn’t about sex; it’s about power and control. And it’s got to stop. We need to get the whole of society on board, because it’s not just a women’s problem. This is a male problem as well, so it’s all of us getting together and saying this should not be happening in this day and age.’
Research into sexual violence invariably mentions the vulnerability of the women who are raped. This infuriates Yvonne. ‘Being a woman is being vulnerable. Any woman can be raped, any woman can suffer from sexual violence, so the myths about whether they’ve been drinking or wearing short skirts, all of that should be debunked. The research should be into why men rape women. That’s what needs to be looked at, not which women are raped. What makes these men think that they can rape women?’ Male rape does happen – and not just to gay men – but the problem is far smaller. Ninety-nine per cent of victims are women and girls, and 99 per cent of perpetrators are men.
Today there are crisis centres for the survivors of rape and sexual violence in most parts of the country but public awareness of the issue – and sympathy for survivors – is relatively new. The attitude tended to be that girls who were raped were asking for it. Jimmy Savile’s death, in 2011, brought sexual abuse onto the front pages. The entertainer everyone had thought so saintly, if creepy, turned out to have been one of the most prolific sexual predators Britain has ever known. Before that there was no funding and little specific expertise in the field of childhood abuse, or help for victims going through the criminal justice system.
Try as she might, Yvonne could find no one with a high profile prepared to come and look round the centre in Croydon, let alone lend their name to it. She had tried royalty, and she’d tried movie stars and actresses. None of them was prepared to engage. So when she wrote to Camilla in 2009 – two years before Savile, and a year before the first WOW festival – she wasn’t hopeful. ‘I was floored to get a reply from her office to say that she would be really interested in visiting. You could have knocked me down with a feather, really seriously.’
