PEOPLE who know Camilla say that they think of her as someone they are drawn to — a nice-natured, charismatic, uncomplicated, robust, outgoing girl. (NB: those who inhabit Camilla’s world refer to women as “girls” regardless of age.)
The novelist Jilly Cooper, who has been a friend of Camilla’s for many years, says, “I adore her and she is a terrific laugh and I don’t know anybody who cheers me up more than she does.”
Someone else, who used to have her to stay in the country, says, in a raspy, cigaretty voice similar to Camilla’s own, “She is a frightfully nice person. She is simply someone about whom there is nothing bad to say.”
Of course, people do say bad things about her: Camilla is the wicked witch of the West Country; a marriage breaker; her house is unhygienic. Someone who knows her once said that there have been times when she hasn’t washed after hunting, that she was happy to leap, still sweating, off a horse and into an evening dress without having a bath. It was a good friend who said this, and he was intending it as a compliment, comparing rough-and-ready game girl Camilla to pristine, high-maintenance, neurotic Diana. Someone else remarked, comparing Camilla to the Princess, “If she has a problem, rather than go and see a therapist, she is a lot more likely to go foxhunting, come back, put some rum in her tea and have some scrambled egg.”
People who lived like Camilla did then don’t worry about getting dog drool over the steak and kidney pie filling, and they have black lines under their fingernails from weeding round the taddle stones in the front of the house. People like Camilla come from good, solid four-square homes in the countryside with untidy rows of muddy boots by the back door.
A florid-faced man called Broderick Munro Wilson, someone who knew Camilla as a child and who could have been Mastermind champion with his specialist subject “Camilla — Toddler to Puberty”, has spoken many times about her family, the Shands. “Camilla was very easygoing. She was into boys much quicker than other girls of her age. There was this daredevil element in her. She would make the running. She is a girl who has probably always known what she wanted and gone for it.” Someone else once noted that Annabel, Camilla’s sister, was “not the sort to throw her knickers on the table”. The implication seems clear. Camilla was very much the sort who did.
A female friend of the family said, “They (the Shand children) always had an enormous amount of confidence and they had their parents to thank for that. They were loved to death, which was most unusual in their class in those days. They were raised by praise and it showed. They always seemed much more sophisticated, more at ease with themselves. They were also very unselfconscious about their bodies. While we spent all our time covering ourselves up, they wore bikinis. It’s not that they had particularly good bodies, it was just that they weren’t ashamed of being women.”
People say this sort of thing a lot about Camilla — that she is no great shakes to look at but that there is something about her. Camilla’s peers at Queen’s Gate school in South Kensington, where she is remembered for climbing on to the roof for cigarettes, say that she wasn’t particularly pretty or fashionable but that she was popular and managed to get herself noticed. Lynn Ripley, who went on to become the pop singer known as Twinkle, has many recollections of Milla. “I started to wear way-out clothes, but Milla never got out of her twinsets and tweed skirts. She didn’t seem to mind being different to the others. Girls can be cruel but there was an inner something in Milla that others recognised as stronger.”
Camilla went briefly to Mon Fertile finishing school in Switzerland, where her friends have recalled that she lost weight, gained cheekbones and learnt how to kiss boys, a pastime she apparently described as “quite deliciously wonderful”. In those teenage days Camilla was known for her showy behaviour with men, for being raunchy and randy. “When a boy hove into view she could turn on the headlights — and how!” yelped someone who knew Camilla, the debutante.
When Camilla joined the line-up of debutantes in 1965 in order to curtsey to a big cake at Queen Charlotte’s Ball, which is what they all do, she, like the other young “virgins”, wore white. But she certainly had boyfriends who she went to bed with. Kevin Burke, son of Sir Aubrey Burke, the deputy chairman of the Hawker Siddeley Group, the aircraft manufacturer, and therefore very much the right sort of chap, never confirmed whether or not he went to bed with Camilla two days after her party as has been reported, but he has talked, fondly and ruefully, about their time together. “Every night we went to two or three cocktail parties and then a dance. It was the best time and I had the best partner you could wish for. She was never bad-tempered. She knew how to have fun. I remained with Camilla all that year. I suppose we were in love . . . Then she ditched me.”
It wasn’t Kevin Burke who described her as a puppy, but someone who had been to the flat she shared at that time with Virginia Carington in Ebury Street. “It was typical Camilla. Her bedroom looked like a bomb had hit it. Virginia was fairly tidy and organised and Camilla drove her nuts. Virginia once told me, ‘You know, Camilla has this inability to hang anything up on a hanger. And she has an aversion to cleaning fluids of any description. You should see the state of the bathroom when she’s been in it’. But she was so sweet it was impossible to be angry with her.”
Soon after ditching Kevin Burke, Camilla went out with Rupert Hambro, of the fantastically rich and powerful Hambro banking family. Then Andrew Parker Bowles hove into view; not so rich, not so powerful but dashed handsome and a bit aristocratic. Camilla turned her headlights on full beam. From that time, Camilla, when not in the country with the horses, could generally be found at her new boyfriend’s flat in the Portobello Road.
“You would go round there on a Saturday morning,” recalls a friend, “and Andrew would be cooking breakfast and making coffee. Around 11, Camilla would stagger downstairs looking bleary-eyed and a little dishevelled. She would walk around wearing one of his big shirts. She would sit on Andrew’s knee and tease his hair. They clearly had a very lusty, healthy life together.” A former girlfriend of Andrew Parker Bowles’s has said “his greatest gift to women was the knowledge that sexuality was healthy — something to be explored. That openness about sex was his gift to Camilla. She was very innocent when they met, but they spent many, many nights together. He schooled her in the ways of the world.”
