At the start of the 1920s, London was a city in frantic pursuit of the new. In cars driven full pelt around the narrow streets, the young, rich and beautiful chased the latest fashion, the latest restaurant, the latest dance craze and the latest nightclub. The sons of the families living in the private palaces lining London’s parks had been decimated in France during the first world war. The surviving young drank vast amounts of alcohol and experimented with morphine and cocaine and played the gramophone to learn the latest dance steps before hitting the floor at Ciro’s, the Cafe de Paris, the Savoy and, the archetype of them all, the Embassy.

In restaurants the young crowd were louder, attempted to drink more champagne than anyone had before and danced on the tables, the women sometimes wearing nothing under floating skirts. Nudity was all the rage. Women appeared in transparent dresses.

A fashion began for receiving guests while still in the bath and then openly and slowly dressing in front of them. One hostess, Mary Mond Pear-son, waited one evening until all her guests had arrived at her Belgrave Square mansion and then descended the curving staircase wearing nothing but a famous string of family pearls which reached her pubic hair.

Into this world from Kenya in early 1921 came a Lady Idina Gordon, a 28-year-old aristocratic divorcée with a painful past – including two failed marriages. Being divorced was no longer an insurmountable scandal. Before the war, England and Wales had witnessed about 500 divorces a year.

In 1920 this had leapt to more than 3,000 as war-damaged marriages were brought to an end. But Idina had shown herself to be not a woman who had erred once but an errant woman. She had crossed a threshold that separated her from her once-only divorced friends and was left off aristocratic invitation lists and blanked in public. Her name became a byword for disreputable behaviour.

Socially outlawed and branded a wicked woman, Idina clearly decided she might as well be as bad as she could. She had her hair shingled to razor-thin shortness at the back and painted her fingernails green. With her pet serval cat on a leash, she stayed out all night and slept all day.

She was welcomed into the home of an old friend, Olga Lyn, known as Oggie, in a Georgian terrace in the shadow of parliament. Oggie’s had become the Piccadilly Circus of the artistic and louche. Actresses, dancers and musicians passed through. Between lunchtime and dawn the front door opened and closed, glasses clinked, cigarette lighters flared. Dinners were thrown for 20 at a time, the guests having to prove their worth with witty epigrams or outrageous “stunts” designed to entertain the others. Artists and impresarios chatted and argued, fell in and out of love and in and out of bed. Lovers were no longer hidden, as they had been during the war, but flaunted. The only social crime here was dullness.

In July the demimonde went south to the Riviera. Idina went with them. At the end of August they moved on to Venice, where Oggie took a palazzo for a month. They sunbathed on the Lido and drifted along the canals by night, stripping off and leaping into the water, their naked bodies glistening in the moonlight. Back in England, Idina bought herself a Hispano-Suiza limousine with a vast bonnet and silver stork on the front and careered around London in it, sober, drunk or somewhere in between. When she wanted to stop somewhere she left it, often motor humming, in the middle of the road.

And there were the men. They came and went. Each new body provided not only some degree of sexual satisfaction but also a physical reassurance that she was not alone – at least not for those hours. The outside world saw none of the torment, only the scandal in Idina’s life. As she moved from bed to bed to satisfy her cravings – all of them: not just for sex but for company, affection and perhaps in the hope that this new liaison might be “the one” who would change her life again – her reputation as a seductress spread. She was “reputed to have had lovers without number” and to be an expert on the erotic use of lingerie: teaching at least one man how to touch four strategic points on a skirt that would make a pair of stockings slide to the floor.

Idina kept moving on. So long as she was occupied, or looking forward to the next amusement, she had no time to look back. Soon she had a new, younger husband and was returning to Kenya.

Ahead of her lay decades of notoriety that would climax in a murder and one of the greatest sexual scandals to hit the British Empire. IDINA entered my life like a bolt of electricity, 30 years after her death. It was November 1982. Spread across the top half of the front page of the Review section of The Sunday Times was a photograph of a woman standing encircled by a pair of elephant tusks, the tips almost touching above her head. She was wearing a drop-waisted silk dress, high-heeled shoes and a felt hat with a large silk flower perching on its wide, undulating brim. Her head was almost imperceptibly tilted, chin forward, and although the top half of her face was shaded it felt as if she was looking straight at me.

She was, the newspaper told me, irresistible. Five foot three, slight, girlish, yet always dressed for the Faubourg St-Honoré, she dazzled men and women alike. Not conventionally beautiful, on account of a “shotaway chin”, she could nonetheless “whistle a chap off a branch”. After sunset, she usually did.

The Sunday Times was running the serialisa-tion of a book, White Mischief, about the murder of a British aristocrat, the Earl of Erroll, in Kenya during the second world war. He was only 39 when he was murdered. He had been only 22, with his whole life ahead of him, when he had met this woman, I read. He was a golden boy, the heir to a historic earldom and one of Britain’s most eligible bachelors. She was eight years older.

They had married after a two-week engagement. Idina had then taken him back to live in Kenya, where their lives dissolved into a round of house parties, drinking and nocturnal wandering. She had welcomed her guests as she lay in a green onyx bath, dressed in front of them and made couples swap room keys. She was, said James Fox, the author of White Mischief, the “high priestess” of the miscreant group of settlers infamously known as the Happy Valley crowd. And she married and divorced a total of five times.

I was 13 years old and transfixed. Was this the secret to being irresistible to men, to behave as this woman did? Kate, my younger sister, wanted to read the article too. Prudishly, I resisted. Kate persisted and within a minute we were at the dining-room table, the offending article in Kate’s hand. My father looked at my mother, a grin spreading across his face, a twinkle in his eye. “You have to tell them,” he said.

My mother flushed. “You really do,” he nudged her on. Mum swallowed and then spoke. Idina, she revealed, was my great-grandmother.

As the words tumbled out of her mouth, the certainties of my childhood vanished into the adult world of family falsehoods and omissions. Five minutes earlier I had been reading a newspaper, awestruck at a stranger’s exploits. Now I could already feel Idina’s long, manicured fingernails resting on my forearm as I wondered which of her impulses might surface in me.

“Why did you keep her a secret?” I asked. “Because” – my mother paused – “I didn’t want you to think her a role model. Her life sounds glamorous but it was not. You can’t just run off and . . .”

“And?” “And, if she is still talked about, people will think you might. You don’t want to be known as ‘the Bolter’s’ granddaughter.”

My mother had been right to be cautious: Idina and her blackened reputation glistened before me. In an age of wicked women she had pushed the boundaries of behaviour to extremes. Rather than simply mirror the exploits of her generation, Idina had magnified them even as a teenager. While her fellow Edwardian debutantes in their crisp white dresses merely contemplated daring acts, Idina Continued on page 2 went everywhere with a jet-black pekinese called Satan.

That heady era before the first world war abounded with dashing young millionaires – scions of industrial dynasties. Idina had married just about the youngest, handsomest, richest one, Euan Wallace, who had inherited the equivalent of £15m today at the age of 15 – and a much greater fortune at 21.

But, having reached the heights of wealth and glamour at an early age, Idina fell from grace. When the sexual scandals of Kenya’s Happy Valley gripped the world’s press in the 1930s, Idina was at the heart of them. When women were making bids for independence and divorcing to marry again, Idina did so – not just once, but several times over. As one of her many inlaws told me: “It was an age of bolters, but Idina was by far the most celebrated.”

She “lit up a room when she entered it”, wrote one admirer, “DD”, in The Times after her death. “She lived totally in the present,” said a girlfriend who asked, even after all these years, to remain anonymous for “Idina was a darling, but she was naughty”.“The fabulous Idina Sackville [her maiden name]”, wrote Idina’s lifelong friend, the travel writer Rosita Forbes, was “smooth, sunburned, golden – tireless and gay – she was the best travelling companion I have ever had”.

Her female friendships lasted far longer than any of her marriages. She was known never to steal men from other women – only to scoop up those already abandoned. And above all, wrote Rosita Forbes, one of her closest friends, “she was preposterously – and secretly – kind”.

As my age and wisdom grew fractionally, my fascination with Idina blossomed exponentially. She had been a cousin of the writer Vita Sackville-West but rather than write herself, Idina appears to have been written about. Her life was uncannily reflected in the writer Nancy Mitford’s infamous character “the Bolter”, the narrator’s errant mother in The Pursuit of Love, Love in a Cold Climate and Don’t Tell Alfred. The similarities were strong enough to haunt my mother and her sister, who were Idina’s granddaughters from her first marriage.

Aged 17 and 18, fresh off the Welsh farm they had been brought up on, they were dispatched to London to be debutantes in a punishing round of dances, drinks parties and designer dresses. As the two girls made their first tentative steps into each party, their waists pinched in Belville Sassoon ball dresses, a whisper would start up and follow them around the room that they were “the Bolter’s granddaughters”, as though they, too, might suddenly remove their clothes.

In the novels, Mitford’s much-married Bolter flees to Kenya, where she embroils herself in “hot stuff . . . including horsewhipping and the aeroplane” and a white hunter or two as a husband. Like the Bolter, Idina famously dressed to perfection, whatever the circumstances. Her scandals were manifold, including, perhaps unsurprisingly, a case of horsewhipping. She certainly married one pilot (husband number five) and almost married another. There was a white-hunter husband who, somewhat inconveniently, tried to shoot anyone he thought might be her lover.

A farm halfway up an African mountain is not the usual place to find such an apparently tireless pleasure-seeker as Idina. Clouds, her home overlooking the Rift Valley, was a palace by African mountain standards, made all the more striking by the creature comforts she had managed to procure several thousand feet above sea level. It was nonetheless a raw environment. Lethal leopard and lion, elephant and buffalo roamed around the grounds of its working farm, where “Idina had built up one of the strongest dairy herds in Africa”, said a fellow farmer who used to buy stock from her.

She took farming immensely seriously, surprising the Kenyans who worked for her with her appetite for hard work and her habit of, like them, walking around the fields and riding through the bush barefoot in a shirt and corduroy trousers. As Rosita put it, Idina “was an extraordinary mixture of sybarite and pioneer”.

However, behind this extraordinary mixture lay a deep sadness. Driving her wild life and her second, third, fourth and fifth marriages was the ghost of a decision Idina made, back in 1918, which led to her fall from grace. On the day the first world war ended, she had written to her young, handsome, extremely rich first husband, Euan Wallace, and asked for a divorce.

She then left him to live in Africa with a second husband, in comparison with Euan a penniless man. She went in search of something she had not found with Euan. When, not long after, that second marriage collapsed, Idina was left to go on searching. Whenever she reinvented her life with a new husband, she believed that, this time round, she could make it happen. Yet that better life remained frustratingly just out of reach. Eventually she found the courage to stop and look back. But by then it was too late.

She died with a photograph of Euan beside her bed and had clearly continued to love him deeply. Yet she had left him. Why? The question wriggled away inside me.

My mother told me almost none of the above. In fact, she told me barely anything at all. She simply said that Euan Wallace, her grandfather, was, by all accounts, breathtakingly handsome, heartbreakingly kind and as rich as Croesus when he married Idina in 1913. Their first child, David, had been my mother’s father. A year later Euan and Idina had had another son, Gee. Idina had then gone to Africa, leaving the two boys. Euan married the famously beautiful eldest daughter of the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens and had three more sons.

Later, in the second world war, Euan and four of his five sons, including my mother’s father, had all died. My mother had been two years old, and had no memory of her father. Billy, the only one to survive the war, had been friendly with Princess Margaret but had died, childless, of cancer before the age of 50. The Wallace family had come to an abrupt end.

After this much, my mother raised a wall of noisy silence. Idina was not, she said, a person to admire.

In 1990, when I was 21, Billy Wallace’s widow died and we received a pile of photograph albums and some cardboard boxes. I sat on the floor of my parents’ London sitting room and ferreted through them with my mother. The albums fell open to reveal endless pictures of Billy and his mother, Barbie, picnicking with the royal family; the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret as children outside Barbie’s house; and a large black-and-white photograph of a young and beautiful Princess Margaret in the passenger seat of an open-top car, Billy behind the wheel.

My mother lifted the lid off one of the cardboard boxes and scattered the contents on the floor. In front of me lay the photographs of five young second world war officers. Their hair was slicked down under their caps, their skin unblemished, noses and cheekbones shining. The portraits were unnamed.

My mother could identify her father from the other photographs she had. She had also known Billy well enough to pick him out. The three that remained were all RAF pilots: bright-eyed, smiling pin-up boys in their uniforms. They were my mother’s uncles, Johnny, Peter and Gee Wallace, each of whom had died in the war. And we didn’t know who was who.

“I was only two when my father went,” my mother murmured.

“Not went, died. Nobody left you. They all simply died, one by one.”

There was a theory, my mother continued, that it was the pink house. Pink houses are unlucky. They moved into that pink house and then they all went. I nodded. My mother was not having a logical moment. The best thing to do was to nod.

Then, softly, I broke in. “Idina didn’t die then, though. Did you ever meet her, Mum?”

“No, I didn’t.” “Why not?” “Well, it would have been disloyal to Barbie, who brought up my father. In any case Idina wasn’t interested in my sister and me. She didn’t care.”

“Oh.” “She was not a nice woman.” “Why, Mum? You’re not that old-fashioned. Just having a few lovers doesn’t make you a bad person.”

“Well, it’s not exactly the best, or happiest, way to behave, but you’re right, that didn’t make her a bad person.”

“Then what did?” My mother turned and looked me straight in the eye: “My grandmother was a selfish woman, Frances. In 1918, when my father was four and his younger brother just three, she walked out on them and her devoted husband and disappeared to live in Kenya with someone else.”

She went upstairs and came down again with another photograph. It was a black-and-white picture of two tiny boys in thick woollen and collared jerseys and knee-length shorts. Their hair has been tidied for the photograph but on each is bounding back in its own direction. Instead of looking at the photographer, they are huddled next to each other, eyes wandering up and to the side.

It took me another decade and a half to realise the full horror of that photograph and what I had been told Idina had done. Another decade and a half of simmering fascination until, in the first years of this century, I had two small children of my own, of whom I possessed innumerable photographs standing side by side, at the same age that my grandfather and his brother had been when Idina had left.

I thought of those little boys often at my own children’s bedtime, which caused me to linger, casting excess kisses into my little ones’ hair and giving in to their unending, “Mummy, I need to tell you something. Just one last thing.”

Idina, the person whom I yearned most to meet in an afterlife, had, according to my mother, done something that now made me feel quite sick. But Idina was beneath my skin.

Just as I was beginning to fear the wear and tear of time myself, stories came to me of Idina’s ability to defy it. In her fifties, she showed not a trace of self-consciousness when removing her clothes; even after three children “she still had the full-breasted body of a 35-year-old”.

At parties, she would walk into a room, “fix her big blue eyes on the man she wanted and, over the course of the evening, pull him into her web”.

One evening, in the 1940s, Idina sauntered into the rustic bar in the Gilgil country club on her estate, where an officers’ dance was in full swing. She slipped off her gold flip-flops and handed them to the barman, Abdul, asking him to “take these and put them behind the bar”, walked across the floor, showing off still-perfect size-three feet, and folded herself on a pile of cushions next to the twenty-something girl who would later tell me this story.

Idina raised her hand, always heavy with the moonstone of a pearl she wore (given her by Euan), lit a cigarette and, blowing immaculate smoke rings, informed the girl, “We share a boyfriend”, making it clear that she held a prior and current claim that she did not intend to relinquish. The boyfriend in question was a 24-year-old army captain, 30 years younger than Idina.

Far from driving me away from her, the horror of what Idina had done in leaving her children magnified my need to know why she had left a husband she loved and what had happened to her next.

And, oddly, stories abounded of her kindness and maternal affection, of her wearing a big heart on her sleeve. “While my parents were away,” said one female friend, younger than Idina, “she looked after me so tenderly that I find it impossible to believe that she was anything but an adoring and excellent mother.” This same woman made Idina godmother to her eldest child. So what had made her bolt from a husband she loved? Was there a story behind it, or was it just some impulse, an impulse that one day might resurface in me?

Eventually my mother handed me two worn briefcases overflowing with photographs and letters. Some were from Idina. She always wrote in pencil. She couldn’t stand the mess of ink.

Her script was long and fluid, each letter the stroke of a violin bow, curling at the end. Her words, lurching across the page, thickened in my throat as I read what she wrote in September 1944: “There is so little I can say for what are words when one has lost all one loves . . . thank God you have the children . . . how unutterably lonely you must be in your heart.”

Through her own efforts, Idina had been reconciled with her grown-up sons. But first one, Gee, and now the other, David, my grandfather, had been killed. Her words trembled in this letter to David’s wife.

Even within the breezeless still of a shuttered dining room, I held her letters tight, folded them, put them back in a pile weighted down, lest they should flutter away.

And out of these, and several other people’s attics of house and mind, tumbled a story of a golden marriage slowly torn apart during the first world war and a divorce that reverberated throughout Idina’s life and still does today.

© Frances Osborne 2008

Extracted from The Bolter by Frances Osborne to be published by Virago on Thursday at £18.99. Copies can be ordered for £17.09, including postage, from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585

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