An incident which  I have forgotten about occurred in our polo playing days. We played a match at Moiben against a family who were staying with the Ridleys. They were three sisters Angela Murray, Yoskill Gibb and Daphne Lakin and her husband. The three women were the sisters of Lord Cowdray or ‘brother John’ as they called him. After the match they told all of us that if any one of us should come to the UK they would be happy to have us come to stay and play polo with them.

My mother, who was a great snob, latched onto this and when we came home to the UK on leave she must have got in touch with them and I was duly kitted out with riding clothes and despatched by train to the nearest station. I was met by a chauffeur in a Rolls Royce. After a couple of miles I felt very carsick and asked if I might sit in the front with him. We became very friendly and he told me how his old mother had recently died. He was very upset but he said that he had had a tombstone erected for her and he had found the ideal words to put on her gravestone and these were “The last trumpet sounded, an angel voice said ‘come’, the evinley gates was opened and in walked Mum”. I said I thought that would be lovely. All too soon we arrived at Cowdray Park, driving through a magnificent  estate with flowering rhododendrons, azaleas and acers. We were met at the door by the butler who escorted me down miles of corridors to a large bedroom with a curtained four poster bed in the middle and a life sized portrait of Lord Cowdray’s wife who had died. The maid ran a bath for me and and when I returned to the bedroom I found she had unpacked my little suitcase and placed my hairbrush and pot of Pond’s vanishing cream in the middle of the vast dressing table. I dressed in my one and only long evening dress and somehow negotiated my way back to the sittingroom where everyone was gathered.

I was introduced to Lord Cowdray whose left arm ended in a hook (he’d lost his arm during the war). The conversation centred around politics of which I knew nothing, whether they should spend the summer at their lodge in Scotland or their ranch in Rhodesia. They had provided a young man (a chinless wonder from Eton) to partner me and we had nothing to say to each other. We went in to dinner and afterwards repaired to the second billiard room where brother John put his golden retriever up on to the table and we were invited to fire billiard balls past him while he pranced about trying to intercept them. Of course the baise was pretty well destroyed.

The next day we played tennis and I was able to acquit myself reasonably well. In the afternoon we went to the Polo ground, I was given a grey pony who probably knew more about the game than I did. I found it quite difficult to cope with double reins and a strange mount but got through three chukkahs without disgracing myself. My father and Uncle Noel were there to collect me and take me home.