My father the control freak

When David Hicks, Britain's most celebrated interior designer, knew he was dying at the age of 69, he checked himself out of the Brompton Hospital after one night, saying he was late for a memorial service. The truth was that, even in death, aesthetic concerns triumphed over the practical.

"He loathed the hospital because there was so much plastic around and the nurses were so badly dressed," says his 39-year-old son, Ashley Hicks. He is speaking in the library at his Chelsea home. He is also an interior designer, married to Italian designer Allegra Hicks. Prince Charles is the godfather of their daughter, Angelica.

Ashley was with his father when he died in March 1998 in his Brideshead-style canopied bed at his Oxfordshire home. "At that moment, I had been reading to him a description from a volume of royal memoirs of how the gravel outside Montagu House was raked every day, whether it had been driven on or not," he says.

Such harmony between father and son would have been impossible to contemplate had the brilliant but cantankerous David Hicks died four years earlier.

Although the difficulties he experienced with his society model daughter, India, a bridesmaid at Charles and Diana's wedding, have been well publicised, what is not known is that relations between Ashley and his formidable father had deteriorated to the point where his only son was "practically unable to speak to him".

It was only 18 months of therapy on Ashley's part that ensured they ended up getting on "incredibly well" in the last year of his father's life. "I had forgotten all the good stuff about growing up, which was fabulous. I became completely relaxed and just found it all slightly absurd."

Not long before he died, Ashley was summoned to his father's library, where Hicks senior was seated at the giant mahogany desk that had been inherited by his wife, Lady Pamela, the daughter of Earl Mountbatten, whom Hicks had married in a splash of highsociety publicity in 1960.

Pointing to two cabinets stuffed with memorabilia, David appointed his son the custodian of his "fame". "At that point I did have a jaded view of his life as his business had gone terribly wrong. I asked him if his life had been a success, and he said, 'of course, well, I'm famous, aren't I?' It didn't really matter to him what he was famous for."

Ashley has now written an extremely personal and not always flattering memoir of his father that for the first time unmasks the true David Hicks.

"I found one of his diaries, written when he was first living in London in the 1950s, when he describes going out to dinner and then adding: 'I walked back home, very stylishly I thought'," says an amused Ashley. "He was obsessed with aesthetic perfection, but it was a veneer."

By the time David Hicks International went bust in the late 1980s, their relationship had already broken down. "I was longing to get my own back for the terrible things I felt he had done to me as a child. He'd been an impossible character - however perfect you were it was never enough."

Ashley's childhood ended abruptly aged 16 in August 1979 while on a family holiday in Ireland, when his grandfather, Earl Mountbatten, was murdered by the IRA on board his fishing boat. Also killed was Ashley's 15-year-old cousin, the Hon Nicholas Brabourne.

"I didn't go on the boat because I went to buy some cigarettes," says Ashley. "It was a beautiful summer's day and I was with India, watching television. We had the windows open and then we heard this big bang."

The tragedy marked a watershed for the Hicks family, ending their cycle of idyllic family summers in Ireland, and Christmases spent at Broadlands, the Mountbatten ancestral home where his father always took the precaution of taking his own light bulbs - he loathed the sight of yellow bulbs in his bedroom - and a suitcase full of pillows.

In the same year, his father's business went "temporarily" wrong and they sold Britwell, their stately country house in Oxfordshire. As a young boy at Stowe, Ashley remembers attending the three-day Sotheby's house sale - the family moved to a less grand home, The Grove, on the estate - with a friend from school who bid for a David Hicks table.

"It was rather a lot to deal with at once," says Ashley. "And then my father started losing his looks [he developed a muscular disease that caused his neck to swell]. Yes, it did become more difficult between us. I started to stand up to him - there were terrible scenes."

Disastrous business management meant his father lost creative control of the Hicks interior design name, which had become an arbiter of style in the 1960s, decorating houses from the Nixon White House to Gatcombe Park. "Just about everything they did in the Eighties was absolutely ghastly."

When Ashley announced that he was going into design, his father became prickly. "I would show him something and he'd look through it and say, umm, that looks familiar. I think he felt threatened."

One evening, Ashley and Allegra invited his parents over to dinner in Chelsea to show off their new five-storey house for the first time. Guests included Tony and Lucy Snowdon. Every time Lord Snowdon made a complimentary remark "my father became crosser and crosser". When Snowdon began describing a new recipe for cleaning silver plate, Hicks senior interrupted: "Silver plate? We don't have any."

It was such "ridiculously snobbish remarks" that often led to rows. His father, he says, had always been a control freak. When Ashley was brought up in the 1960s at Britwell, his mother was never given any say in the interior design. The house was like a show-home, with an immaculately uniformed butler and his father's Rolls-Royce parked outside.

"It was terrifying at times because he could be very angry indeed, and would shout and scream. He was terribly insecure. If you ever tried to explain who a new designer was, he would be furious, and then would go off and try to find out what it was all about."

His father's insecurity was born from the fact that when his own father, an Essex stockbroker, died (David was 12), his mother handed control of the family finances to a cousin who lost everything.

David Hicks acquired an almost unnatural affection for the aristocracy. He once told Ashley that the "one great achievement" of his life was that he married Lady Pamela Mountbatten.

"He was the greatest snob who ever lived," says Ashley. "My mother was frequently embarrassed. Every time we passed a statue of Queen Victoria, he would say, 'Now children, don't forget that is your great-great-great grandmother'."

Now, Ashley enjoys taking small groups around the garden at The Grove, created by his father towards the end of his life. The highlight is the pavilion where his father lay in state. "All these ladies from Virginia are horrified when I say I decorated his coffin using the very first fabric he designed, and that my mother stuffed his obituaries into his pocket."

David Hicks: Designer by Ashley Hicks, (Scriptum Editions, £30) published 1 December.