It pays to be a pack rat—or, in this case, maybe a pack ermine—when your daughter comes calling about turning your life into a coffee-table book. Visiting her mother at the Grove, the relatively lesser Oxfordshire dower house from the later years of Pamela Carmen Louise Mountbatten’s marriage to the jet-setting decorator David Hicks, India Hicks sits on a favorite pink sofa for a dive into a past inseparable from a good chunk of English history. Together, they cull through memorabilia from Lady Pamela’s “muniment room,” the kind of storage or display room for historical documents and family papers commonly found on great estates.
Born in 1929, the second daughter of Lord Louis Mountbatten and the heiress Edwina Ashley, Lady Pamela knows her way around the architecture of nobility—and how to tightly shut the gates of hereditary reticence. Daughter of Empire, her 2012 memoir, forced her to overcome some of her resistance to making the personal public, but there was still plenty for her daughter to pry loose. A “persuasive assault,” Lady Pamela labels the latest of Hicks’s books, which have primarily focused on Harbour Island, in the Bahamas, and the pink-sands chic of her mini retail, hospitality, and real-estate empire there. (Lady Pamela’s release coincides with the launch of Night on the Tiles, Hicks’s latest home-goods line.)
