Coming Up Trumps by Baroness Jean Trumpington

This autobiography has been dictated to someone - it reads exactly like someone having a long, hard chat. So this book is very good company. In one part it gets rather boring as the author talks about old friends she knew in the old days with whom she played tennis, or went to Ascot, or had "such fun". But there are a few anecdotes that did make me smile.

Here is one from Jean's early days as a wife of a fellow of Queen's College, Cambridge:

"One small fly in the ointment was that my early attempts at cooking were a bit hit and miss, and sometimes dropped as well. My first tossed salad was tossed  straight in the dustbin because I made it with a cabbage and not a lettuce."

"My early attempts at entertaining were similarly disastrous. The first thing I did was to invite the porter to tea, confusing the college porter with the college master.... There were a lot of undergraduates around when I issued this invitation and they killed themselves laughing. I had no idea I was doing anything peculiar. To his great credit, the porter came to tea and a jolly nice time we had."

Jean's husband was frustrated at not being made a Professor of History, so he went back to teaching at Eton, and then to be headmaster of the Leys School, where Jean enjoyed being the headmaster's wife.

"Only once did my behaviour really infuriate Barker. It was three weeks before the end of our last term. For seventeen years we had been at The Leys, and for seventeen years, on every Speech Day, it had been by job - my only job - to walk around the edge of the indoor swimming pool, terrified I would fall in, holding the various cups to be presented to the winners of the swimming gala. In this seventeenth year, when I had paraded around the pool for the final time, with the final cup, I jumped in, at the deep end, fully clothed, in my best Speech Day dress. The masters were astonished, the boys beside themselves with delight.  Of course, almost the entire school followed me in, to 'save' me. Barker wouldn't speak to me for three weeks afterwards. I'm not surprised. It was so naughty, But so funny. I had suffered all those years and I just wanted a little bit of fun."

Later Jean is made Mayor of Cambridge and has yet more fun: she wears a large gold chain to every function and is followed everywhere by a mace-bearer, in his own ceremonial robes, with a huge gold mace, so she insists he follow her onto, for example, the dodgems at the fair, and on the fairground horses!


This shows the Mace-bearer wearing his robes and showing his mace to the Queen. He is supposed to use it to defend the Mayor.
 

Here you can see her have fun on HIGNFY