Ferdinand Mount, writer and journalist, is author of Cold Cream: My Early Life and Other Mistakes and Kiss Myself Goodbye: the Many Lives of Aunt Munca. He remembers his mother, Julia Mount, née Pakenham (1913-56), sister of the prison reformer Lord Longford. She married Robin Mount, a writer and amateur jockey.
My mother laughed when she was described as Junoesque because she knew perfectly well that what people meant was ‘fat’. Like all her siblings except her eldest sister, Pansy, she was large-boned and not naturally graceful.
‘Pakenhams have no spring’ was one of her pronouncements about her family. ‘Pakenhams are too odd to get into Parliament’ was another.
So far both claims have proved correct.
The novelist Barbara Pym was at Somerville with her, and wrote in her diary for 27th January 1934, ‘In the afternoon I went shopping by myself. I saw Julia Pakenham looking superb in a turquoise blue frock and new halo hat. She was wearing a fur coat, so one couldn’t see how fat she was.’
I like to think of my mother swinging along the High Street or more probably the Cornmarket where the clothes shops were, dolled up in her turquoise frock and halo hat with
