Kiss Myself Goodbye: The Many Lives of Aunt Munca

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The book is beautifully written. The author is a complete master of words - just the right tone, just the right word, just the right cadence to a sentence to communicate sympathy, amusement, or surprise as he unfolds the amazing and fascinating story of Aunt Manca. What a story! The contemporary references to T.S. Eliot, W.E. Johns, David Dimbleby, and many other well-known people whose lives brushed hers place the story firmly in the time he is describing. And the places where the action took place are described vividly. Particularly fascinating was his description of Manca's time in Crawford Mansions where she lived below T.S. Eliot at a time when Marylebone was a slum. 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. As I read on, I noticed that these scenes had been described in meticulous detail, but I’d been erased from them. Georgie was one remove away from a birth-parent to me. Indeed, she was far more a mother to me than Munca ever was to her. Imagine reading a book about a mother-figure in your life, describing with painstaking precision occasions where you were present but excising you from them. It stung. I was startled that Mount would do something so improper. When two people telephoned me to say they’d noticed the same thing, I realised my reaction wasn’t just down to bruised ego and pettiness.

Delightfully compulsive and unforgettably original. Mount unpeels the layers of this mysterious life with the tenacity of an experienced detective and the excitement of a fresh-eyed enthusiast. * Hadley Freeman, author of House of Glass: The Story and Secrets of a Twentieth-Century Jewish Family *What a wonderful time Ferdinand Mount has had researching this rich fount of fantastic lies woven into a massive web of destructive deceit by his Aunt Munca! This is a glorious family history too outrageous for fiction with ever yet more astounding revelations in every chapter. I loved it. They say most families have a skeleton in the closet somewhere along the line. The skeletons in this book wouldn’t fit into a closet – they’d need a whole graveyard. This book proves the maxim that fact is stranger than fiction, and then some. If it was a novel, it would be dismissed as complete nonsense, so wildly implausible that it couldn’t possibly be taken seriously. But it’s not a novel, it’s all documented fact. 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 this book, which is partly a family history and partly a detective novel, with extraordinary revelations and an impressive cast of characters dotted through the narrative.

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. * Daily Telegraph * Georgie Johnson with Charles Donovan, 1975 (Photo: Hugh Donovan / used by permission of Charles Donovan) 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. 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.As a child, Ferdinand Mount accepted his Aunt Munca as children accept most things in the adult world--as just the way things are. But there's was always something odd and inconsistent with her--shifting relationships and names, dropped hints about the past, appearing and disappearing people. And just where did all that money come from? As an adult he becomes obsessed with finding out who exactly she was and how she became the rich extravagant aunt with the giant personality that he knew. Every thread he pulls opens up a new surprise, and he uncovers an unexpected history of disguised origins, changed names, altered identities, obscured parentage, multiple marriages, multiple divorces, multiple adulteries, multiple bigamies. Aunt Munca is an appalling person who did a lot of damage as she charged through her life, scattering husbands and lovers and relatives and children as she went, but she's also pretty compelling and weirdly admirable. This is a woman who refused the limits of the life she was born into and who never, never, never accepted a defeat. Their will was the one way in which the Mounts might have said ‘sorry’ to Georgie, but — astoundingly — they appear not to have felt that they had anything for which to say sorry. Furthermore, they had clearly primed the trustees to operate against Georgie’s best interests. This process of making a request to the trust was so arduous and frightening for Georgie, it may have hastened her death. Delicious ... As well as an ear for the cadences of a sentence, Mount has a remarkable ability to convey the feeling of place ... Beneath the surface of this sparklingly wry book you sense all kinds of unexplored feelings of abandonment and loss. * The Oldie * 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. It's thought-provoking, heart-wrenching and a real eye-opener. All is not always as it seems, let us not judge anyone based upon Title and material wealth.

Delightfully compulsive and unforgettably original. Mount unpeels the layers of this mysterious life with the tenacity of an experienced detective and the excitement of a fresh-eyed enthusiast.

Ferdinand Mount’s Aunt Betty, or Aunt Munca as she wanted him to call her, was married to his father’s brother, Greig, who was accordingly known as Unca. The names Unca and Munca were lifted from Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Two Bad Mice: Hunca Munca, who lives beneath the floorboards, vandalises a doll’s house when she discovers that the delicious looking food on the plates is made of plaster. 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. After Munca died, Georgie told my mother she’d never before been allowed to decorate her own home and needed help — she didn’t know how to do it. My mother guided her through the decorating of her flat in Fulham and then her first two houses in Suffolk. Gradually, the things that had been stifled to dormancy by her parents began to flourish — her own tastes, her own sense of style, her own ideas. I particularly enjoyed Mount's journey of discovery through genealogy research, the way he found out so much from birth, marriage and death certificates. He has a difficult job as Munca didn't seem to tell the truth about herself so every single detail is hard won.

I was so pleased to read the last chapter to find out what had happened to everyone in the story. What meticulous research Mr Mount has done. this book, which is partly a family history and partly a detective novel, with extraordinary revelations and an impressive cast of characters dotted through the narrative. * Roland White, The Sunday Times (Culture) * I'm normally not drawn to these sorts of memoirs (i.e. personal recollections about the author's wealthy family members), but Ferdinand Mount's "Kiss Myself Goodbye" is so well-written and bizarre that I stayed up late to finish the book in one sitting. It's true: Mount's mysterious Aunt Munca was a millionaire, but she was born into poverty and obtained her money by being a talented liar. Grifting those who've benefited from inherited wealth is a much more interesting story than pure nepotism.

Finding Your Story

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. In Cold Cream , his acclaimed memoir of 2008, Mount describes with all of his usual wit, self-deprecation and astuteness how he came to arrive at the policy unit, Thatcher seemingly having forgotten that she’d once thought him an “idle and effete youth who was full of the consensus mush of the 1960s and who was indulging Keith Joseph [later a minister in her cabinet] in his fatal tendency to believe the last thing he was told”. It is to her credit that she only began to withdraw after a health ordeal hit her hard. As soon as Georgie told me about her oral cancer diagnosis, I came to her side. She was understandably terrified of an operation that was going to remove parts of her face. I came to stay again, just before the surgery, for moral support. Although the surgeons left her with only a faint scar and some damage to the inside of her mouth, she took it badly. It had a slight but noticeable effect on her diction. After all that childhood conditioning about perfection, no wonder what seemed like a miraculous recovery to her friends was nothing of the sort to her. When we spent Christmas 2007 together, she didn’t want to eat in front of me, because the damage to her mouth made eating a more ungainly process. Eventually, she began skipping eating altogether, subsisting on build-up drinks. 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.