MAJOR Bruce Shand, father of Camilla Parker Bowles, is giving his first ever interview. The man who brought up the mistress of the future King of England is talking about marriage, sexual promiscuity, his children, the upper classes, the Queen, the effect of Camillagate on his family, his extraordinary upbringing and being a prisoner of war.

He’s sitting in the conservatory in his home, a former rectory opposite Plumpton race course. It was here that the beleagured Camilla was raised. It has a croquet lawn, beautifully tended English country garden and traditionally decorated rooms filled with antiques.

Shand, 76, is handsome and charming. He has the bronzed and furrowed face of a keen gardener and a cheery smile. He talks with old fashioned pronunciation, often ending his sentences with an upper class snort, what? He’s dressed in moleskins, toning socks and mocassins. Unlike Camilla, who cares little for her appearance, the 6′ 3′ Major looks as if he has walked out of a Ralph Lauren advertisment.

After the publication in January of the Camillagate tapes, it was alleged that he tried to ban Camilla from seeing Prince Charles.(Friends say that the Prince and Camilla have not seen each other since before Christmas for fear of further rocking the Monarchy; that their love is on hold.) It is said he thinks his daughter’s life has been ruined by the Prince. Certainly the affect on her health was visible and the pressure on the family intolerable.

He has said he won’t discuss his daughter. But how does he feel about sexual permissiveness? ‘It’s a pity that the ties of marriage have been so destroyed by it.’What has been the affect of the scandal on his life? ‘Let’s just say highly intrusive.’ Has it been difficult for him? ‘We all survive, what?’ What does he think about the damage done to the Monarchy? ‘I mustn’t say anything about that. You’re very good at putting the knife in the oyster shell.’

Has the country gone to the dogs? ‘There’s been a tremendous deterioration of conduct and respect.’ Does he have regrets? ‘Life is full of regrets. I’d better not say more. I might say something indiscreet,’ he says, typically laughing uproariously. He once worked for the Queen and is a master of discretion.

He spent 16 years in the Queen’s Household, as Clerk of the Cheque and Adjutant of the Yeoman of the Guard. ‘We were always dressed for the Battle of Waterloo.’ His most arduous duty was to carry the standard on State occasions. Once, cramped for room when he was required to lower the Standard to the Queen as she passed through the Royal Gallery he managed to hook the handbag of a French visitor on its butt end. ‘That was dramatic, what? The Queen was very amused by the whole thing.’

We talk then about his extraordinary upbringing. ‘My father had four wives,’ he says. ‘We had a very strange relationship. I never even saw him until I was 38 – apart from at my grandfather’s funeral when I was 18. I don’t think I’d ever have seen him, had my wife not said that the children should meet their grandfather.’

Shand was the only child of his father’s first marriage, raised partly by his mother and stepfather in America, and by his grandparents. ‘My father left my mother when I was very young. Very much later he married Elseth Howe’s mother. There were 17 years between us and I never even saw Elspeth until she was 16.’

Shand married Rosalind, the debutante daughter of Baron Ashcombe, in 1946. They had three children. His other daughter, Annabel Elliott?? sp??has an antiques shop. His explorer son, Mark Shand, wrote Travels on My Elephant.‘Because of my disruptive childhood, I was very keen to see that my own children had an even run. They all had an agreeable time.’ He is close to his offspring and happy with the way they’ve grown up. ‘I’m very proud of them all.’

Were there any particular difficulties in bringing them up? ‘I don’t think we had any more problems than anyone else. They’ve always been quite chatty. There haven’t been any inhibitions in their upbringing that I know of.’

We talk then about his war. Shand, who wrote Previous Engagements, a lively account of his war, has a distinguished army record. He was a second lieutenant in the Royal Lancers and won the MC and Bar for obtaining valuable information about the enemy on patrol. ‘But at grievous cost. Two officers and men were killed… In Belgium I saw a party of lunatics, escorted from an asylum by splendid nuns, being shot by German aeroplanes… We often went three nights without sleep. You began to feel a brick floor was the most seductive place in the world. ‘

He was in the eighth army in 1942 when he was wounded and taken prisoner of war for two years, after the Battle of Alamein. ‘Rather a dreary performance.’ (He has that upper class habit of underplaying things.)‘I ran into a group of German vehicles. Only distinction was that it was said to be Rommel’s HQ,’ he says, roaring with laughter. ‘I got hit in the face (he has the scar beneath his eye) and the leg. The agony came later.’ Is he brave? ‘Don’t think so. There’s no point getting in a flap on these occasions, what?’

He journied in lorries and trains diverted by partisans and blown up lines, sailed from Derna to German occupied Piraeus in a hospital ship that had been the Czar’s Black Sea Yacht and ended up in a Russian hospital. ‘A cynical french doctor said to me, ‘if you don’t get enough food your wounds won’t heal and you’ll probably die.’ A cheerful gallic approach to life, what?’

He went to Spangenberg, a prisoner of war camp. He says gleefully that his Rugby schooldays prepared him for the ‘tedious’ experience. He’d never return. ‘I’ve always found Germans an incredibly depressing, humourless, dull people.’

After the war, he became a partner in a Mayfair wine merchant. But he would have liked to have been a publisher. His grandfather wrote an abstruse book on psychology, called The Foundations of Character. Has he read it? ‘Ach no. I think I’d be hard pushed to, what?’ But Shand edited ‘One Young Soldier, the memoirs of a cavalry man’ (out last month) about his friend the late Tim Bishop, brother of Molly Bishop/Lady Scott, Britain’s grandest society portraitist.

Despite the early knocks to his constitution, he appears robust and spritely. ‘I survive! The health centre nurse the other day said she wanted to talk about the delicate question of drink. As far as I can see, a ‘unit’ is an invisible thing! When I told her what I drank, she said, ‘Terribly sorry, you’re a heavy drinker.’ I’m very glad to be in distinguished company!’ His emotional warmth is surprising in one of his background. He is a also a humourous, honourable, immensely likeable man. ‘A sweet and decent man,’ remarks Nigel Dempster.