Forgotten passages in time

London: They say it's the good girls who keep diaries and the bad girls who never have the time. Where does that leave Lady Pamela Hicks? She had a ringside seat at some of the momentous events of modern history and although her father, Earl Mountbatten of Burma, bullied her into keeping a journal, when life got really interesting the entries somehow dried up.

Take the autumn of 1947. She and her family were in the ferment of post-partition India, where Lord Mountbatten was last Viceroy. She'd received a handwritten note from Princess Elizabeth asking her to be a bridesmaid at her wedding to Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten and telling her about the Norman Hartnell dress she'd wear. Philip was her cousin.

The Mountbattens were nervous about leaving India but, deciding that not to go would have drawn attention to the crisis, they flew home for 10 hectic days of partying and preparation. To Pammy, 18-years-old and a recent escapee from the gloom of a wartime English boarding school, it was beyond thrilling - yet not a word of her impressions reached her journal.

"I went to my diary for '47 and found that those 10 days are a complete blank," says Lady Pamela. "What a comment on my diary-keeping! Life was just too busy and exciting."

Redemption

Five years later, by now talked up as the most eligible girl in England after Princess Margaret, she had the chance to redeem herself as a royal Boswell. Pamela Mountbatten was lady-in-waiting to the Princess when she set off for Kenya on the first leg of a tour to Australia and New Zealand.

With Elizabeth, Philip and only three other people, she climbed the ladder to Treetops Hotel, perched in the branches of a giant fig tree and overlooking a salt lick. While they were there on February 6, 1952, watching elephant and rhino visit the pool at night and taking photographs of the sunrise, everything changed.

"We had a wonderful night seeing all the game," recalls Lady Pamela. "But the king died in the night. So Elizabeth went up that ladder as a princess and came down as queen - but we had no idea until much later. And guess what's missing from my record? The fig tree!" Pammy, juggling a typewriter and the Princess's parasol, had dropped the typewriter into shark-infested waters as the royal party was disembarking from the SS Gothic.

Lady Pamela's cheerful account of her lapses is delivered with the brio of someone who knows she's always going to be forgiven. She's not afraid to admit her teenage memories of the wedding day are outdazzled by the grand pre-wedding ball given by the king and queen for 1,200 people - an occasion where a European prince asked for her hand in marriage after only one dance.

She says the biggest let-down of the wedding day was when Prince Baudouin, heir to the Belgian throne, refused to join the bridesmaids at Ciro's nightclub. "He was the only other young person around. We all thought: 'Tall, dark and a future king.' But he played safe. We thought he was stuffy beyond words for not coming."

David Milford Haven, Philip's socialite cousin and best man, decided on Ciro's because it was harmless, she recalls, and most of his friends wouldn't have been seen dead there. "It was where you were taken to initiate you into night life, not where you were defending your honour."

The day itself, she says, passed in a happy blur, and not just because she's short-sighted. Her impression of the royal couple - both related to her - was of two people caught in a fairytale.

"In those days, my God, he was handsomer than a fairy prince because he was so masculine. And she, with that marvellous complexion, had absolute star quality. With the golden coach and beautiful horses, it was a kind of vision. It poured with rain but the crowd, in that very British way, ignored it and queued all night to get a place. Standing on the balcony afterwards, seeing the enormous crowd rush up to the gates of the Palace, was an incredible feeling."

Designs

To mark the day, Prince Philip gave the bridesmaids a silver and rose-gold powder compact he had designed himself. "When we compared them, we were very chuffed to see that each one was slightly different but with the initials E and P. Mine has six little sapphires down the middle. I used to have it in my bag all the time but suddenly it's no longer safe when you're going on the bus or Tube or walking the streets."

Lady Pamela is a robust 78-year-old and her fine house in rural south Oxfordshire seems a world away from muggers and pickpockets. However, she was robbed in Sloane Street two years ago - had her wallet "removed", as she puts it - and that has made her cautious. Her husband, the interior designer David Hicks, died nine years ago.

Encouraged by India, their younger daughter, she has just published India Remembered, a breezy account of life in the viceregal palace at the time of the partition. (It was so vast, she observed, that a complete tour of the house took two hours and was best done on a bicycle.) In the book, she nails the rumour that her mother, Edwina, had an affair with Pandit Nehru. Their immediate attraction "blossomed into love", she says. "Although it was not physical, it was no less binding for that. It would last until death."