A Prince Comes West
Brought Up in England. By Prince Chula of Thailand. (Foulis. ars.) THERE is an engaging Young Visiters' like quality about much of this book. " The first time there was a gathering of royalty," writes Prince Chula of the Coronation of King George VI, "Prince Chichibu kindly offered to introduce me to the various princes, and I told him tactfully that I knew them already." And so he should, for had he not represented his King at many illustrious gatherings, besides lunching frequently at Buckingham Palace and even fleeing for some time the presence of the young lady he was ultimately to marry, since, as a possible heir to the Thai Throne, he thought it his duty to kee7 clear of European entanglements?
Childhood had been passed entirely in Thailand, between the palaces of his father, Prince Charabongse, and his grandmother, the Chief Queen of King Chulalongkom: a world as remote to con- temporary Westerners as the Steppe villages of Aksakoff. "My bed was just behind my grandmother's. . . . Just as I had got into bed grandmother would be starting dinner or breakfast, which- ever way one looked at it. . . . Often I would wake up at 4 a.m. only to hear the conversation going on at full swing. If I was wideawake, then I would listen for a while and often learn quite a lot from it, or more often I would just turn over and go to sleep again.". The Queen shared the family passion for motor-cars (she won'd buy twenty or so every year after the London Show to give to her friends and relations), but Westernisation had not cut deep: Prince Charabongse's third chauffeur was a sorcerer.
After this, a private tutor's at Brighton, with tinned salmon for supper, was an abrupt change. " I was much struck by the fact that whenever she knelt down to pray my tutor's wife pinched the bridge of her nose until it became bright red. I did not dare to ask her why she did it. I just presumed that perhaps Christians found it necessary to give themselves pain when they were feeling devout." Harrow was better fun, Cambridge better still. Although allowed no more than £i,00o a year by his King, Prince Chula managed to keep a car and chauffeur and give a great many parties (all, he tells us, successful) besides coxing his college boat and getting two seconds in History.
It was at the end of his Cambridge career that he first made friends—a friendship vigorously discouraged by his royal uncle— with his cousin, Prince Birabongse, then a boy at Eton. Before long we find them setting up house together in London, devoting them- selves to a family of fox terriers, driving at top speed about Europe (Bira at the wheel and Chula, as he says, " perhaps the best car passenger par excellence"), marrying English wives, and ultimately establishing the White Mouse Garage, which, with Chula's adminis- trative enterprise and Bira's skill, was to spread the fame of Thailand throughout the world of racing motorists. Those to whom this
sport presents few attractions InAt well find the earlier chapters and the accounts of successive returns to Thailand more entertaining than the other parts of this autobiography ; but Prince Chula's ingenuous zest and excellent memory make his book delightful reading of a sort perfectly suited to a long railway journey or a
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