This is the model’s part-time home where she lives with her half-Italian mother Virginia

This is the model’s part-time home, where she lives with her half-Italian mother, Virginia. The cleaner opens the door to empty a bin as I approach and she motions to me to wait in the hallway. The walls are covered from floor to ceiling in hunting trophies, heirlooms and huge paintings that look as though they might be left over from the sale of the castle last summer – the wine cellar alone was valued by Christie’s at pounds 100,000. (Honor’s 18-year-old younger brother is now Lord Lovat.)Little wonder, then, that she has shifted her modelling career into gear and has her sights set on both fame and money.It is 10.30 on the morning of Honor’s shoot with The Independent and I have parked my car outside a pretty Georgian terrace just behind King’s Road in deepest Chelsea.

But a series of personal tragedies – Honor’s father died of a heart attack while out hunting, an uncle was gored to death by a buffalo in Tanzania, and, recently, her grandfather died – coupled with bad business sense, has left the family in debt, more than pounds 7 million of it, and forced them to sell the Victorian castle, 27 houses and more than 2,000 acres of fertile farm land. Her ancestors’ history is prime Hollywood material with all the ingredients of a great blockbuster: a fine and noble family, wailing bagpipes, tartan, treason, executions and an estate that was once the largest in Europe, as well as recent tragedies culminating in last year’s loss of much of the estate through bankruptcy – ideal for Honor’s ambitions to go to film school in New York.In the golden days, the Lovat lands stretched from the east to the west coast of Scotland. If you are beautiful and a society gal, modelling seems the natural thing to do.
Honor Fraser, 22 years old, is a Fraser of Lovat, a family of Norman descent that came to Scotland in the 12th century. Sixties model Verushka’s full name is Countess Vera von Lehndorff, and Italian supermodel Carla Bruni is from the aristocracy too. There’s Stella Tennant, the daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire and the first British face of Chanel. There was the Russian Princess Natasha Paley, who modelled for Cecil Beaton in the Thirties.

Any entry not submitted in the form specified will be deemed invalid. If your story is not published in the anthology or the newspaper by the end of 1996, these rights revert to you. Entry into the competition implies acceptance of these rules.. Word of

Aristocracy and modelling go hand in hand. By submitting a story an entrant agrees to be bound by the terms of this agreement, and to sign it if called upon to do so. A copy of the form of contract may be obtained on application to Scholastic Ltd.

Entry grants to Scholastic Ltd the exclusive right to publish an entrant’s story in all formats throughout the world for the full legal term of copyright. Any story chosen for publication in the anthology that does not win one of the top three cash prizes will receive a fee of pounds 200.Rules This competition is not open to employees of, or relatives of employees of, Scholastic Ltd or Newspaper Publishing plc or anyone connected with the competition Proof of posting cannot be accepted as proof of delivery. No responsibility can be accepted for entries which are delayed, damaged, mislaid or wrongly delivered. The judges’ decision will be final and no correspondence can be entered into. The winning story will be published in The Independent in June.

The top three stories and up to ten other entries will be published in the autumn by Scholastic Children’s Books in a Story of the Year 4 anthology (a list of stories chosen will be published in The Independent at the same time). The story should start on a separate sheet, with no name on any of the pages, so that it can be judged anonymously. The first page of the entry must consist only of your name, address and telephone number. Entries must be typewritten, double-spaced and on one side of the paper only Stories cannot be returned, so please keep a photocopy. Stories submitted must be unpublished, but the competition is open to published writers We will not accept stories with illustrations. You may enter once only, and the entry must be made by the writer, not on his or her behalf. It has a pounds 2,000 prize for the winner and pounds 500 each for two runners-up.