HUGO VICKERS Biographer & Historian
The Kiss (1996)
Hardback (UK) 1996
Paperback (UK) 1997

'Thank God - my darling Dick came this morn, and brought his Christmas gifts, bless him. Heavenly seeing him. He is so adorable - and gave me the most wonderful kiss I have ever had in my life - blessed darling.'

With a simple kiss, Joan Kappey lost her heart to a man many years her junior. The obsession which began that winter's day in 1960 would last the rest of her life. In the Windsor house that she shared with her sister, Christian, she made a shrine of her loved one's image, his photograph staring down from every corner of her sitting room.

Hugo Vickers met the Kappey sisters as a schoolboy at Eton in the late 1960s. When he visited them for lunch one Sunday, he could not fail to notice the haunting picture and wonder at the story that lay behind it. In time he would piece together the strange and poignant details of Joan's passion for Dick, but also find that it was part of a much larger tale - that of the Keppey family, whose memory had been lovingly preserved over three generations, and of their friends, impoverished gentlefolk living out sad, brave lives under the shadow of Windsor Castle.

With the help of personal reminiscences, the sisters' private papers and his own friendship with them over a period of nearly twenty years, Hugo Vickers traced the people, events and circumstances that shaped their lives, from their childhood on. The result is an affectionate and absorbing portrait of a vanishing class, which puts into perspective - if it can never completely explain - the mystery of the kiss and the extraordinary obsession that followed.






Copies of both the hardback and the paperback are available via this site, and can be signed
by the author.
Apply: booksales@wyeford.co.uk