Domino and her grandmother. Two tenacious women.

When my darling Domino was about to be born in 2007, my four other children, my husband and our dog came with me to Miami from the tiny island in the Bahamas that we live on. The island boasts world class beaches but nowhere to give birth. My mum - Lady Pamela - also joined us, flying from London, aged nearly eighty.

Seeing me in labour and wanting to be helpful, she asked the nurses what she could do to help.  ‘Oh, please do hold a leg,’ they said. She did -  but watching her daughter in the throes of a contraction, thrashing about in pain with the miracle of life unveiling itself before her eyes, my mum suddenly said, “I’m going to faint” and stumbled backwards. Everyone dropped what they were doing and ran to hold her. Domino appeared moments later, totally unfazed. My mother’s own appearance in 1929 fazed everyone, most especially my grandmother who was on a jolly jaunt around Spain and was thoroughly put out to realise my mother was arriving a few weeks early.

My mother was given the middle name Carmen, after her Spanish Godmother Carmen, the Duchess of Peñaranda, who later caused a great scandal by running off with a bullfighter. Domino was also given the middle name Carmen, only because my mother made me promise to never call her Pamela.

Domino reading about her Grandmother quite a few years ago

My mother may have grown up surrounded by dazzling people, places, houses and history, but her parents made it clear from an early age, she was never allowed to ‘swan around’ – she was even made to pay rent to her parents when living at home.

The moment she arrived in India at the tender age of 17, following her parents who had been appointed as the last Viceroy and Vicereine, she was put to work in the medical camps just outside Delhi . This led to a lifelong involvement with charitable organisations - and to me (and in turn my daughter) being aware from an early age that ‘from whom much is given much is expected.’

Making her grandmother proud, Domino has already been part of several initiatives with Global Empowerment Mission, the foundation I work with, although she’s not yet accompanied me to the front lines of Ukraine. That’s a little too hair-raising; for now, it’s her brothers who come with me on those trips.

Despite her astonishingly privileged upbringing, there were tricky times my mother had to navigate – times that today would leave us breathless with anxiety. “Did your mother really forget which hotel she left you in and not return for several months when it was meant to be a few days?” I ask. ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘but darling I was with my sister and nanny and we did have fun in those forests.’ ‘But when you were sent to the USA during the war you didn’t see your parents for nearly a year and did not even know if they were alive…’ And on it goes till my mother sighs and suggests that we are rather an over-emotional generation.

My mother never taught any of us to cook - she never learnt herself. Once having supper with her sister and their cousin, Prince Philip, she tried to make spaghetti. 'Place contents in boiling water,’ the instructions read. So, not imagining it meant removing the spaghetti from the can first, she placed the unopened can in the water and retired to the sitting room to join the others. When a loud bang was heard they rushed back into the kitchen and there, hanging from the ceiling, was the spaghetti. “Well, at least we know it’s cooked,” said Prince Philip. But she could teach us manners. Good manners. Minding our Ps & Qs, always being punctual, writing dreaded thank you letters (not notes and most certainly not texts).

Domino on the other hand knows how to let yeast rise when baking her own doughnuts, she knows how to hunt down an açai bowl in any remote corner of the world, and how to download a code onto her phone and ride off into the distance on an electric bike in a foreign country whilst I’m still wondering what day of the week it is. She came with me on a two week work trip around Australia when I was speaking about the Princes Trust and she has just been beside me from Dallas to Toronto for a series of book signings talks and dinners, an efficient and very empathetic assistant (she cries whenever she spots an elderly person, they don’t have to even be in distress!) She spends many weekends with her grand mother, when not at home in The Bahamas, eating lunch together, looking out across the avenue of trees my father planted, as Domino shares news of her brothers or they sit in comfortable silence.

I think all 3 of us were rather similar 17 year olds, my daughter, my mother and myself, despite the world having changed dramatically over time ,we knew, and know, that it takes a tenacious girl to get through life.

But on some levels, my mother’s was a different world. I was once at an event in North America when two lovely ladies introduced themselves. “We knew your father David Hicks,” said one. “He invited us to visit him in England and look round his Oxfordshire garden,” said the other. “We arrived on the suggested day, having taken a car out from London,” she continued, “rang the doorbell and waited. Your mother answered the door. “We are here to see David Hicks,” we explained. “You have just missed him,” said my mother. “He died earlier this morning. But you must come in and have tea, you’ve come all the way from London.” Much to their astonishment they were ushered into the drawing room.

How lucky for Domino to share not only a name with her grandmother but to have such a grandmother. And how lucky for me to have such a daughter.