Coming Up Trumps: A Memoir

Book excerpt: Forthright, witty and deliciously opinionated, Jean Trumpington's Coming Up Trumps is a wonderfully readable account of a life very well lived. In this characteristically trenchant memoir, the indomitable Jean Trumpington looks back on her long and remarkable life. The daughter of an officer in the Bengal Lancers and an American heiress, Jean Campbell-Harris was born into a world of considerable privilege, but the Wall Street Crash entirely wiped out her mother's fortune. At fifteen the young Jean Campbell-Harris was sent to Paris to study but two years later, with the outbreak of the Second World War, she became a land girl. However, she quickly changed direction, joining naval intelligence at Bletchley Park, where she stayed for the rest of the war. After the war she worked first in Paris and then on Madison Avenue, New York, with advertising's 'mad men'. It was here that she met her husband, the historian Alan Barker, and their marriage, in 1954, ushered in the happiest period of her life before embarking on her distinguished political career, as a Cambridge City councillor, Mayor of Cambridge and, then, in 1980, a life peer.