As the train pulls in to Kettering station it is impossible to miss her. Six
feet tall, with an upright, military bearing, wearing a purple skirt and a
pink fleece. Miranda Ponsonby has big, tanned hands, a firm handshake and
looks younger than her 76 years.
On the dashboard of the Saab in the car park she has scanners for detecting
speed cameras. “You can’t drive at 100 mph without these,” she chuckles. “I
haven’t lost the ability to frighten people with my driving.” She spends the
next 20 minutes proving her point.
Miranda’s attempts to break the septuagenarian land speed record are by no
means the most remarkable thing about her. The reason I am here, clinging to
my seat, is her extraordinary past. For while there have been Ponsonbys
clustering around the throne, leading the charge on battlefields and
pontificating in Belgravia drawing rooms for several centuries, this famous
aristocratic family has never seen anyone quite like this.
For Miranda was born a boy. For more than half a century he played the roles
expected of him by his social peers: public school boy, sportsman, soldier
and farmer. Then he underwent a mid-life crisis the like of which the shire
hunting set had never seen.
Miranda writes in The Making of Miranda, her new autobiography, that in
“spineless men” the male menopause “manifests itself in depression. In more
dashing types it is running off with a younger woman. In my case, being of
the latter persuasion, it was running off with myself.”
Her home is a modest bungalow, where two large chows are shuffling around the
garden in the drizzle. It is jammed with furniture, books, paintings and
black and white photographs of her former self, riding behind the Queen,
inspecting the guard at Whitehall, scoring goals on the polo field. There
are pictures of her two sons at Eton. Then there are shots of somebody who
appears to be an impersonator of Diana, Princess of Wales, looking into the
camera with doe eyes from beneath hair swept into the style of the people’s
princess circa 1985. This is an early photograph of Miranda, soon after her
sex-change operation.
Miranda says that she was “never in doubt” that she was a girl. She says that
her sex was in doubt at birth, but has no evidence for this beyond vague
memories of men in white coats and of sitting in baths of pink liquid which
she believes followed “adjustment to my genitialia”. Much later a doctor
confirmed, however, that she had not been a hermaphrodite, but was born a
boy who grew up imagining himself to be a girl.
Rhodri Davies, as she was named, grew up in a large house in the middle of
Wimbledon Common, in southwest London, in “the endless high summer
afternoon” of the years between the wars. His grandfather, Timothy Davies,
was a self-made man turned MP and a friend of Lloyd George. Rhodri’s father
was a fighter pilot in the First World War and a reservist who died in the
Second World War. His wife, Prudence Ponsonby, was a society beauty. Miranda
believes that Prue was involved in some sort of clandestine activity during
the war and writes in her book that later she “died a violent death in
Germany”. A death notice in The Times records that she perished
in an air accident in Frankfurt in 1952.
After leaving public school — she won’t name it because she describes a sexual
encounter with an older boy in graphic detail in the book — Rhodri enjoyed a
life of luxury and big game hunting in Africa, as the sun set on the Empire.
He later gave up a place at Oxford to join the Life Guards and narrowly
escaped death in Aden when his vehicle was blown up, killing his driver.
These events are mentioned only in passing in the autobiography. Miranda
prefers to dwell on the gilded life of an officer, partying all night in
London, hunting at weekends and playing polo with Prince Philip. She claims
that Ronald Ferguson, the father of Sarah Ferguson, became a good friend and
introduced Rhodri to Ma Feathers, a “very exclusive” bordello, where he had
his first, rather unsuccessful, sexual encounter with a naval officer’s
wife.
He later fell in love with a woman he refers to in the book as Lady Annabel
and says that, had they married, Miranda Ponsonby would never have existed.
“We had so many other things in common,” she says. “We loved each other.”
As it was Rhodri married “June” on the rebound. They were together for more
than 30 years, farming a few hundred acres in Leicestershire, where they
lived in a manor house with swimming pool and tennis court.
Then came the mid-life crisis. Miranda compares her experience with that of
Jan (formerly James) Morris, the journalist and writer, who remained married
and “everyone accepted him because of the type of people they were. A more
enlightened set. In my world they wouldn’t accept you.” Scornful of
psychiatrists and counsellors, Rhodri eschewed the protracted process of
preparation for a sex-change operation and paid privately for a doctor in
Rotherham to do the job immediately.
“My family has always said that I do things that nobody else would. People
think about doing things, but never do it. I always do it. And rush into it.
But having done it, even though it might be a mistake, I make such an effort
to make a success of whatever I’ve done that in a way it turns out perhaps
not to have been a mistake.”
The book makes it sound as though the operation wasn’t wholly successful, and
that another was required to remove an extraneous testicle. Does she wish
now that she had followed the recommended route? “No. Much more successful
the way I did it,” she says. “To leave one of the buggers in is a bit much
but, by and large, no terrific damage done.”
The marriage ended before the operation and Miranda accepts the blame for its
failure. “It never occurred to me that I would lose the family,” she says.
Her two adult sons were shocked by the sex change. “The first thing the
eldest said was: ‘It’s very odd because you played cricket and polo and
there couldn’t be more masculine careers than the Army and farming.’ They
were horrified and I don’t blame them.” Miranda claims to have been banned
from her younger son’s wedding and learnt later that members of the family
had said on the day that Rhodri had disgraced his regiment. She now has no
contact with her sons or her grandchildren. The elder son has sold the farm
“and disappeared. I don’t know where he is.”
Rhodri also disappeared. At a memorial service in Leicester Cathedral for an
old friend, Everard de Lisle, Miranda heard her former self being talked
about. “People behind me were discussing Rhodri [but] they didn’t recognise
me. I only had to turn round and say hello and I couldn’t. I thought: ‘If
only I met them. I’m just the same person really.’ But I just couldn’t do
it.”
During the interview, Miranda seems to struggle to make sense of why she did
what she did and how she feels about it. At one point she says: “I wouldn’t
do it again,” then pauses. “Well, it’s difficult to know. I’d have missed so
much if I hadn’t.” Like her first date with a man, for example. He turned up
early and Miranda was still in farm overalls, sans wig. “You must have come
to see my sister”, she said, and rushed upstairs to change, returning with
the news that “my brother was off to London and we would be dining on our
own”.
Later, she had a relationship with “Harold”, an Oxford don. Sex was painful
but, Miranda says, “satisfactory”. Harold eventually proposed. “He had no
idea, which was the extraordinary thing.” They split up when Miranda began
training to be a nurse at Guy’s Hospital. After various temporary jobs, she
got a permanent position on a coronary care unit in Kettering. She prides
herself on having never missed a shift in nearly 20 years. For some time she
knocked ten years off her age. The hospital authorities kept her on for what
they thought was two years beyond 65. In fact she was 75. She plans to
retire when she turns 77 in January.
Miranda has a large circle of friends, many of them nurses. “Because they are
all in their twenties and thirties I never meet anyone my own age except
patients. I’m so lucky that the young are not so prejudiced as we were. They
are prepared to accept you.” One, “Jamie”, gets a whole chapter to herself.
She is a married mother and one of her sons, who has just sat his A levels,
is hanging out with Miranda and sits in on our interview.
I wonder about her feelings towards Jamie — in the book, she fondly describes
“the fine fair down” on her friend’s arms. Yet Miranda says that Jamie is
more “like a daughter” to her, and someone that she can confide in.
Nevertheless, she writes, in a tone of regret, that she will never get to
hold a girl in her arms again.
She says that the chaplain of the hospital once sought her advice about
somebody else who was contemplating a sex-change operation. Her advice was:
don’t. “I have got a strong character,” she explains. “If somebody as
determined as me found it difficult I imagine anybody else would collapse.”
Although Miranda says that she chose to work as a nurse because “I wanted to
enter the most female profession”, she also compares her work with the years
of penance undertaken by the disgraced former minister John Profumo. After
the Christine Keeler scandal ended his political career in 1963, Profumo
cleaned toilets for a charity in the East End of London. There is a
lingering sense that she needs to atone for her affront to the codes of her
old world. “I’ve done a lot for other people with my nursing. I’d like my
friends to see I have paid for the mistake of letting the regiment down.”
She thinks that her genes have a lot to answer for. “The Ponsonby side of me
is the wild side. My great-greatgrandfather led a charge at Waterloo. He
lost his charger at the critical moment, so led the charge on a pony and got
stuck in a ploughed field. They had routed the French. Then he got killed by
a Polish lancer. Very reckless. Very eccentric family.”
The Making of Miranda by Miranda Ponsonby is published Monday July 13
by Noble Books at £11.99. To order it for £10.79, inc p&p,
call 0845 2712134 or visit timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
