Camilla left Queen’s Gate in 1964 having learnt how to fence, but with just one O level, which given her ability was surprising. Miss Knowles must have wondered what on earth had gone wrong. There were perhaps advantages to having nothing more distracting than Blossom and a herd of Guernseys outside the schoolroom door.
She went home to the country for the summer holidays and, along with Priscilla, took a short cookery course with a former teacher from Constance Spry’s domestic science academy who taught from her own house near Lewes. Then, after their birthdays in July – there was just ten days between them – they learnt to drive with the local driving instructor, ‘a dreadful old man’ who developed piles and had to give up. But not before he had got them both through their tests – which were taken in Brighton – on the second attempt. There followed long lazy days with friends, gossiping by the swimming pool at The Laines, where the roses were all in bloom. Kirsty Aitken, granddaughter of the newspaper baron Lord Beaverbrook, was another schoolmate and close friend. Camilla was never short of friends – or boyfriends. That part of East Sussex had an unusually lively social circle, particularly in the horsey world. A lot of the girls she knew had older brothers, and even if they weren’t especially horsey a lot of them had been members of the pony club as children, and had been to all the pony club dances. Camilla attracted them like bees to a honeypot and always had several gangly teenagers pining for her.
The elegant seaside town of Brighton, with its Regency terraces, wide pebble beach and amusement piers, was the local hotspot. They used to go there to the cinema and the theatre, or to hang out in the coffee bars and pubs and buy new releases from the record shops. Camilla was never really into the Beatles but loved the Rolling Stones. Brighton had once, when the railway was built linking it to London in Victorian times, been a very fashionable resort and it was still a lovely town – and since Sussex University had opened there in 1962, it had become younger, more vibrant and edgier. Before anyone could drive, a parent would take them, but when Camilla acquired an admirer a few years older than her, Richard Burgoyne, who owned a snazzy sports car, he drove them. The Shands didn’t drive showy cars. Bruce had a little white van with no seats in the back; the children would all pile in, sitting on the metal floor and sliding around. No regulations about seats or seatbelts in those days.
At the end of the summer Camilla was sent off to finishing school in Switzerland, to a place called Mon Fertile on the banks of Lake Geneva – just one of many such schools at that time. It was the standard next step for well-heeled teenagers who were neither destined to go down the academic path nor yet old enough to be launched into the marriage market. Parents who might have been anxious about letting their daughters go abroad on their own at such a young age were reassured by the solid stability of the Swiss and the multilingual culture around Lake Geneva. So for nine months, they were packed off to learn to ski, to perfect their French, and to learn the finer points of etiquette while having fun in a picturesque environment.
Such places have mostly long gone but at that time, they were seen as a crucial step in completing a girl’s education. Girls learnt flower arranging, how to cook and sew, dress the table for a formal dinner party and taste wine, as well as basic first aid, child care and domestic accounting. Deportment was also an important part of the curriculum. From Switzerland Camilla went to Paris, to the Institut Britannique, and came away after six months having had a lot of fun but with a lifelong terror of lifts. She was stuck in one, she told me, for seven hours with a friend and two Frenchmen. Her team knows better than to try and put her in one. She will walk up any number of stairs rather than be incarcerated in a lift ever again.
But learning to speak idiomatic French was useful. She made a short speech in the language on her first solo foreign trip, to Paris in May 2013, in her capacity as patron of Emmaus UK, a charity founded in the French capital after the Second World War to help homeless people rebuild their lives. She travelled from London on the Eurostar train, to the surprise of fellow passengers, and joked that it was her first official trip without her husband and may be her last. She took some Emmaus companions, formerly homeless themselves, and in typical style told them how she was dreading the speech. ‘If it all goes wrong then I will need you to clap loudly and disguise it,’ she said. ‘I’ll give you all signs to hold up too.’
The signs were not needed. ‘I hope you will forgive my rusty French,’ she said to a crowded room, ‘but it is fifty years since I was a student at the Institut Britannique in Paris.’ Speaking slowly at first, she appeared to grow in confidence as she got into it. The verdict was that her pronunciation was very English but her French was faultless.
Camilla never embraced the Swinging Sixties wholeheartedly, as her sister, her brother and most of her contemporaries did, but when she returned to London fully ‘finished’ in 1965, there was no more exciting place to be. The austerity of the post-war years was finally over, the baby boomers had come of age, they had disposable income, they had ideals and they were wanting a different world from their parents. They were seizing the day and having fun. They marched for CND to ban the bomb; they made love not war; they had student sit-ins and demonstrations; they made their own psychedelic music – the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys, the Animals, the Hollies, The Who; they bought Oz, Richard Neville’s countercultural creation, and Private Eye, started by Richard Ingrams and friends, two magazines that offended and challenged the Establishment; and they questioned all the conventions that had been drilled into them in their youth.
The men grew out their short back and sides and partings, while men and women alike threw out the conservative clothes their parents wore and dressed themselves in pretty, colourful fabrics, beads, bell-bottoms, culottes, wide belts that were purely decorative, thigh-length boots, floppy hats and shaggy Afghan sheepskin coats. It was Mary Quant who had started the fashion revolution – she became the first person to design specifically for the young and we flocked to Bazaar, her iconic shop in the King’s Road, for miniskirts – but others like Ossie Clark, Alice Pollock, Celia Birtwell and Barbara Hulanicki quickly followed, and suddenly fashion was affordable and fun. At the same time Jean Shrimpton, Celia Hammond, Pattie Boyd and Twiggy – a new breed of model – were showing us how to wear it, how to wear make-up and style our hair. We didn’t sit in rollers under great dome dryers as our mothers did; we had our hair cut and blown dry by a new breed of stylist – Leonard of Mayfair, Daniel Galvin and Vidal Sassoon.
London was buzzing. Boutiques and markets sprang up all over but most of the action was in the King’s Road in Chelsea and Carnaby Street in Soho. Clubs and coffee shops also opened, places for young people to hang out and meet their friends and listen to up-and-coming musicians and pop groups. Some of Camilla’s favourite haunts with her friends were the Stock Pot in the King’s Road – where you could eat for peanuts – the Builders Arms in Cale Street and a nightclub in a basement at the bottom of Park Lane.
Camilla was right there in the midst of it all, but remarkably untouched by it. She was never a hippy, but she was no goody-goody; she and her friends had a wild time. She smoked like a chimney, drank her fair share, and loved to party. Priscilla remembers being thrown off a bus by the conductor because she was wearing such a short miniskirt that her knickers were visible. ‘The clippy said it was “disgusting”. It was before the age of tights and I had on stockings and suspenders. It’s now the most embarrassing thing in my life, but that was the era, and of course we didn’t mind a bit, we couldn’t have cared less. We all went to parties and we all behaved badly all the time. The Sixties music was more fun than anything.’
But Camilla was never into