Jane Ridley
UNHAPPY VALLEY
The Bolter: Idina Sackville - The Woman who Scandalised 1920s Society and Became White Mischief's Infamous Seductress
By Frances Osborne (Virago 310pp £18.99)

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In the Nancy Mitford novels there is a character called the Bolter. She is the narrator's mother who lives in Kenya and parks her daughter on an unmarried aunt. She is always falling for unsuitable men, white hunters and people called Juan. The real-life Bolter was Lady Idina Sackville, and Frances Osborne is her great-granddaughter. Frances Osborne first learned of the Bolter when, at the age of thirteen, she read a newspaper article about her. The story of this infamous woman had been airbrushed from the family history, and the quest to retrieve the Bolter became a lifelong obsession.

In Kenya's Happy Valley, Idina was queen. In the 1920s and 1930s she was the leader of the clique of glamorous aristocratic émigrés whose main occupation was sleeping with one another. At house parties, the Bolter wore nothing at all underneath her Kenyan tribal robes, and presided over a game where you drew lots for the partner with whom you were to spend the night. She ran through marriages like other people run through jobs. In the end one loses count, but she had five husbands, not to mention an endless string of lovers.

As Osborne reveals, the Bolter was a poor little rich girl, the child of divorced parents. Her father, Lord De La Warr, walked out on her mother when Idina was four. Her mother, the wealthy Muriel Brassey, defected to Labour, was rumoured to have had an affair with George Lansbury and spent her fortune sponsoring the fashionable cult of theosophy. Osborne claims that theosophy preached the joys of sex, but in fact theosophists enjoined chastity, which was necessary to earn promotion on the spiritual road. For Idina, promiscuity was a rebellion against her mother. In 1913 Idina made a conventional marriage to a cavalry officer named Euan Wallace, the millionaire heir to a Glasgow ironworks fortune who came almost as high up the rich list as the Brasseys. Together, Euan and Idina planned a sixty-room pile at Kildonan in Ayrshire, and lived in a mansion in Connaught Place. They were blissfully, obscenely rich. Then the war broke out, and Idina's world was blasted apart.

Euan fought right through the war. Osborne doesn't give him credit for the emotional strain that this imposed; he kept a diary, but he was not the sort of chap who wrote about feelings. Idina stayed behind in London with her two small sons, David and Gee. The couple grew apart. In 1918 Euan came back on leave and Idina was ill. She couldn't keep up with the socialite Euan, who went out every night with a gang of Idina's younger sister's friends. One of these was Barbie Lutyens. Tall, slender and beautiful, she was better-looking than the chinless Idina and more intelligent too. (At this point I should admit that I am biased - Barbie was my great aunt.) Euan fell for Barbie. Rather than try to save her marriage, Idina began an affair with Charles Gordon and asked for a divorce. Euan told her that she must either give up Gordon or divorce and leave her children for ever. She chose divorce and bolted with Gordon.

Idina shimmied off into the Kenyan sun, leaving two motherless little boys, pathetic figures in jerseys with collars and sad eyes. Barbie got her man and married Euan. She had three more sons, and she was 'mother' to Idina's sons. Idina was not allowed access, but this was no hardship as she was too busy taking her clothes off in Kenya.

Idina created a beautiful house in the Kenyan uplands and married a succession of husbands, each younger and more unsuitable than the last. Most charismatic was Joss Hay, later Lord Erroll, by whom Idina had a daughter. Joss was a compulsive womaniser, and he left Idina after two years. Later, he was murdered in scandalous circumstances. Idina's life became a dreary chronicle of violent husbands and toy-boy lovers. Then a friend arranged for Idina to meet her son.

The voice of David Wallace jolts the book back from being yet another wearisome chronicle of sexual shenanigans in Happy Valley. Urgent, angry, rebellious, David agreed to meet his mother. Briefly, they were reconciled, and Idina later made her peace with Gee, David's much easier brother. Then tragedy struck. The first of the Wallaces to die was Euan. A Tory politician with slicked-back hair and a double-breasted suit who supported appeasement, he died of cancer aged forty-eight. (His father had died at forty-six, his grandfather at fifty-four.) Both of Idina's sons were killed in the Second World War. She never really recovered, but Osborne claims that Idina's despair redeemed her.

Osborne can forgive and admire Idina, but she is pitiless about Barbie, who is cursed as the ice-cold stepmother. In a way, though, Barbie's life was almost more tragic. As well as Euan and his two sons, she lost one son in the war and a second in a minor operation. She became 'Mother Confessor' to the Wallace Collection, whose principal members were her son Billy Wallace and Princess Margaret. Billy, whom she adored, died of cancer like his father in his forties. She lived on, beautiful, dignified and glacial. When she learned she had cancer she quietly killed herself.

Idina left very few letters, which makes it hard to get close to her, and Frances Osborne doesn't really try. Instead, she has written the book like a novel. The voice is posh - 'One of the things a woman does', we are told, 'when she wants to know how much a man loves her is to see how large a piece of jewellery she can persuade him to buy' (oh really). The pace is fast, the story gripping and, as for the Bolter, well, the more one reads the more of a monster she seems. The chilling reality is that she was a woman who broke the last taboo - she left her children.

Jane Ridley is writing a biography of King Edward VII, to be published by Chatto & Windus.