Miranda Amapola Symington, author of My Name Is Not Matilda

A FORMER Swinging Sixties fashion model who later became a transatlantic sailor has written a humorous and entertaining memoir about her life, encouraged by her friend, Kentish Town author Hunter Davies.

Miranda Amapola Symington’s book, My Name Is Not Matilda, includes some off-the-cuff comments made to her by the late Princess Margaret.

Miranda, 78, is fond of Hunter, 88, who she says makes her laugh. And the title of her book is the result of him continually calling her Matilda instead of Miranda.

What’s more, Miranda published the book herself with a little help from friends.

“Not having been a celebrity chef, a TV weather girl or any claims to fame, there is no chance that a real publisher would have been interested,” she told Review.

She bumped into Princess Margaret at a select cocktail party in Covent Garden, when the princess revealed some of her own personal woes.

“Initially, I felt like a frightened rabbit,” Miranda writes. “And without adhering to the royal rule, in a very polite little voice and even more syrupy little smile, I said to the Princess: ‘I do hope you have had an enjoyable day.’”

Miranda did not expect the Princess’s reply to be so interesting. “Well,” the Princess said. “It’s not been a good one. I am tired. I had to go to some awful place in the south of London and open this hall. The trouble is my sister (now late Queen) has all the power and so she gets all the top jobs, and I get the boring ones.”

As a model Miranda remembers one of her very first visits to a West End fashion agency back in the 60s. Lots of photos were taken and a lot of alcohol consumed. “I later walked to King’s Cross station and caught the last train home to Hertford.

“I fell asleep and on waking up dressed in my glad rags at about 4am found myself slumped in a seat, stuck in a railway siding about half a mile down the track.”

She trudged around photographers’ offices with a huge heavy black leather bag stuffed with wigs and all her modelling paraphernalia which she suspects may have caused her back injury, something from which she still suffers.

Miranda looks back at her fashion modelling with laughter but at the time it wasn’t funny.

She writes that a “sleazy, stocky, greasy-haired West End photographer” suggested she needed plastic surgery on her legs, which he claimed were too fat.

“I did not take his advice”.

She also had some fun jobs. She lay on the bonnet of a pale blue Jaguar car in Covent Garden doing a Schweppes advert: “Shhhh, you know who.”

She writes that she always dreamed of one day falling in love with an interesting man and going off on a big adventure. And so she did.

His name was John and he was an occasional sailor and had built a dinghy. They decided they would build their own boat and move in with Miranda’s mum in Norfolk in order to save money.

It would be a 40ft long, and almost as wide, three-hull Trimaran vessel.

Built in a nearby yard, the vessel took two years to complete starting in 1974 and costing £8,000. It was christened Sweet Painted Lady and finally launched in 1976.

After the first year of constant and unrelenting hard work on the boat Miranda remembers one night going into meltdown.

“I sobbed and sobbed and had a rather unladylike screaming and shouting fit,” she remembers. The couple were worn out and had become tetchy with each other.

But that wasn’t the end of the turmoil. Once launched, they often had difficulties concentrating on helming in order to keep the vessel from capsizing, particularly on the Atlantic.

Miranda writes that she’ll never forget the first euphoric moment when the boat was launched at Wells-next-the-Sea.

“It had come alive and was doing her dance on the water.” But she admitted she was “genuinely terrified” having never sailed a boat before. Once on the Atlantic it was as if “ we were sailing up mountains and then falling over precipices into deep valleys.”

Today big boat trips are over. Miranda has three young grandchildren and a home on the Isle of Wight. She spends part of her time encouraging older people in care homes on the island to talk about their reminiscences.

She describes Hunter as generous, vibrant, positive, childlike “and completely out of the box”. Hunter has implied that she is just a tad “out with the fairies”.

She visits and stays with him often and loves Kentish Town’s quaint shops with amazing sales staff who know where everything is. “Go into some big stores these days and nobody knows where anything is.”

But most of all she adores the buses, which stop close to where Hunter lives and take her, sitting upstairs in the front seat, anywhere in London she wants to go.

• My Name Is Not Matilda. By Miranda Amapola Symington, Amazon, £12.99