that is very good and quite irreplaceable when you decided to dispense with the British Monarchy.’
The dinner party that night for thirty guests was late even by European standards, past ten o’clock. Ernest and Wallis knew no one and were at a conversational loss as they had no knowledge of, or curiosity about, hunting. A fact not lost on the prince. ‘Mrs Simpson did not ride and obviously had no interest in horses, hounds, or hunting in general,’ Edward later wrote. ‘She was also plainly in misery from a bad cold in the head.’ Discovering that she was American, the prince kicked off conversation by observing that she must miss central heating, of which there was a lamentable lack in British country houses and an abundance in American homes. Wallis’s response astonished him: ‘On the contrary. I like the cold houses of Great Britain,’ she replied. According to the prince ‘a mocking look came into her eyes’, and she replied: ‘I am sorry, Sir, but you have disappointed me.’
‘In what way?’ said Edward.
‘Every American woman who comes to your country is always asked the same question. I had hoped for something more original from the Prince of Wales.’
***
Wallis, born Bessie Wallis Warfield on 19 June 1896, took pride in coming from old Southern stock. ‘Wallis’s family was very old by American standards,’ said her friend, Diana, Lady Mosley, approvingly. Wallis’s mother, Alice, gave birth to her in a holiday cottage at Blue Ridge Summit in Pennsylvania, where she had gone with her consumptive husband, named Teackle, to escape the heat of his native Baltimore. Alice and Teackle, both twenty-six years old, were fleeing their disapproving parents. Wallis wrote that her mother and father had married in June 1895: ‘without taking their parents into their confidence, they slipped away’. Records show that they actually married on 19 November, seven months before her birth, in a quiet ceremony with no family present. Wallis was conceived out of wedlock, a fact she tried to blur in later accounts of her life. She recalled how she once asked her mother for the date and time of her birth ‘and she answered impatiently that she had been far too busy at the time to consult the calendar let alone the clock’. Wallis learned early the benefits of discretion.
Her mother was a Montague from Virginia. They were famous for their good looks and sharp tongues. When Wallis was growing up, if she made one of her familiar wisecracks, friends would exclaim: ‘Oh, the Montagueity of it!’ Perhaps it was a Montagueism that caused Wallis as a young child to drop the first name Bessie and say that she wished to be known simply as ‘Wallis’. She was ‘very quick and funny’, remembers Nicky Haslam. ‘She could be cutting too. She put people’s backs up amid the British aristocracy in the sense of being too bright and witty.’ On meeting Wallis, Chips Channon declared: ‘Mrs Simpson is a woman of great wit’, she has ‘sense, balance and her reserve and discretion are famous’. ‘Her talent was for people,’ said Diana Mosley. ‘Witty herself, she had the capacity to draw the best out of others, making even the dull feel quite pleased with themselves.’
From a young age, realising that she was not conventionally attractive, and could not rely on the flimsy currency of her looks, Wallis developed an inner resilience and astute insight. ‘My endowments were definitely on the scanty side,’ she later recalled. ‘Nobody ever called me beautiful or even pretty. I was thin in an era when a certain plumpness was a girl’s ideal. My jaw was clearly too big and too pointed to be classic. My hair was straight where the laws of compensation might at least have produced curls.’
Wallis’s father died from tuberculosis when Wallis was five months old, leaving her mother penniless. The Warfields supported Alice and their granddaughter, affording Wallis a happy childhood. An only child, she plainly adored her mother, who summoned up ‘reserves of will and fortitude’ to surmount her single-mother status. Wallis admired her mother for never ‘showing a trace of self-pity or despair’ – characteristics that she inherited and would employ throughout her own life with similar aplomb. Alice urged Wallis never to be afraid of loneliness. ‘Loneliness has its purposes,’ she counselled her daughter. ‘It teaches us to think.’
Wallis and her mother were so close that Wallis described their relationship as ‘more like sisters’, in terms of their ‘comradeship’. Alice Warfield was both loving and strict. If Wallis swore, she would be marched to the bathroom to have her tongue scrubbed with a nailbrush. When Wallis was apprehensive about learning to swim, her mother simply carried her to the deep end of a swimming pool and dropped her in. ‘Then and there I learned to swim, and the thought occurs that I’ve been striking out that way ever since,’ Wallis wrote years after Edward VIII’s abdication.
When Alice first met Ernest Simpson, she warned her future son-in-law: ‘You must remember that Wallis is an only child. Like explosives, she needs to be handled with care. There are times when I have been too afraid of having put too much of myself into her – too much of the heart, that is, and not enough of the head.’ Alice sent Wallis to a fashionable day school in Baltimore, where Wallis was a diligent student. ‘No one has ever accused me of being intellectual. Though in my school days I was capable of good marks,’ she said. As a young girl, Wallis was already tiring of her unsettled life and ‘desperately wanted to stay put’. This desire to find a stable home would become a constant theme in her life, heightened when forced into exile with the Duke of Windsor. For a few years Wallis and her mother lived with her Warfield grandmother, then with her Aunt Bessie, until Alice, craving a place of her own, took a small apartment when her daughter was seven. Wallis loved her grandmother’s Baltimore house: ‘a red brick affair, trimmed with white with the typical Baltimore hall-mark, white marble steps leading down to the side-walk’. Here her grandmother lived with her last unmarried son, S. Davies Warfield – ‘Uncle Sol’ to Wallis. ‘For a long and impressionable period he was the nearest thing to a father in my uncertain world,’ Wallis recalled. ‘But an odd kind of father – reserved, unbending, silent. I was always a little afraid of Uncle Sol.’
A successful banker, Sol paid the school fees until Wallis’s mother married again. Alice’s new husband was John Freeman Rasin, who was prominent in politics and fairly wealthy. While offering financial security, he took Alice to live part time in Atlanta, which was a wrench for Wallis. She was sent to boarding school – Oldfields – in 1912 where the school motto, pasted on the door of every dormitory, was ‘Gentleness and Courtesy are expected of the Girls at all Times’. Wallis’s best friend at Oldfields was Mary Kirk, who was later to play an astonishing part in her life.
In 1913, Wallis and her mother suffered another shock. Freeman Rasin died of Bright’s disease, a failure of the kidneys. Wallis was heartbroken to see her mother so distressed. ‘It was the first time I had ever seen her dispirited.’ Wallis would never forget her mother whispering to her: ‘I had not thought it possible to be so hurt so much so soon.’ Alice had been with her second husband for less than five years.
Wallis left Oldfields in 1914, signing her name in the school book with the bold and rebellious ‘ALL IS LOVE’, and made her debut as part of the jeunesse dorée at the Bachelors’ Cotillion, a ball in Baltimore, on 24 December. (To be presented at the ball was ‘a life-and-death matter for Baltimore girls in those days’, maintained Wallis.) The Great War had begun in Europe in August, and the US daily newspapers were ‘black with headlines of frightful battles’. Baltimore’s sentiments were firmly on the side of the Allies and the thirty-four debutantes attending the ball were instructed to sign a public pledge to observe, for the duration of the war, ‘an absence of rivalry in elegance in respective social functions’. This was, according to Wallis, an attempt to set an example of how young American women should conduct themselves at a time when other friendly nations were in extremity.
Unable to afford to buy her ball gown from Fuechsl’s, Baltimore’s most fashionable shop, like most other debutantes, Wallis designed her own dress. White satin with a white chiffon tunic and bordered with seed pearls, it was made by ‘a local Negro seamstress called Ellen’. Wallis’s
