Daughter of Empire (28 page)

Queen Salote had endeared herself to the British during the coronation, and it was easy to see why she was so loved by her people. She was held in great respect, as a leader, an orator, a poet
and a composer, her songs sung on even the most remote islands. She embodied the spirit of Tonga, where song and dance were part of the everyday life of the people. She understood her subjects and
astonishingly knew most of them personally – they numbered around fifty thousand. A special respectful language was used to address the Queen; another was used for people of chiefly rank, and
the ordinary language was spoken only between people of equal rank. Salote was regarded as the ultimate authority on all questions of rank, precedence and custom, having an outstanding knowledge of
Tongan genealogies. It was an extremely stratified society – your status was determined at birth and your achievements could do little to alter it, yet the social position of women was
extremely high, sisters always outranking brothers within the family, the person deciding important questions such as marriage being the father’s sister. It was forbidden to pass in front of
a person of higher rank, and because Tongans had to ensure that their heads were at a lower height than anyone of greater rank, we often saw people rushing about bent double. It was fortunate that
Salote was so tall and that her sons were only a couple of inches shorter. Her sons were remarkably robust young men, each weighing over twenty-four stone – your weight and bearing being a
sign of how well off and high up the social scale you were.

It was a noisy arrival. The Queen’s first engagement was to inspect the Royal Guard drawn up on the wharf. The route was packed, and for a while each group cheered on a single
long-drawn-out note, and as the pitch for each group was different, the effect was harmonious. The controlled cheering soon deteriorated into shrill yelling, however, which was deafening, and it
continued without break until we reached the palace.

The palace was a small wooden house painted white with a dark red corrugated-iron roof. A large and sumptuous bathroom had been specially installed for the visit. Queen Salote and her entire
family had moved out so that the Queen, Prince Philip, Mike Cowan and I could stay there. They had left the many members of staff, however. My room was tiny, a walled-off passage but with a
particularly comfortable bed. The fact that two sides of the room were composed entirely of windows made dressing and undressing difficult. Each window had tiny net curtains attached and you could
either shut the windows and die of heat or open them and change in view of the whole of Nuku’alofa. As the garden was very small and the wall separating us from the street and neighbouring
buildings was only three feet high, everyone had congregated just beneath my room, cheering and waving whenever I went into it. They thought it great fun when I brushed my hair, so I opted for the
heat, changing and sleeping in a hermetically sealed oven.

A feast was given for an astonishing seven hundred people, all seated cross-legged on cushions. The food was bountiful – roast suckling pig, crayfish, yams, chicken, breadfruit,
watermelons, pineapples and coconut – the freshest and most delicious food we had eaten so far on the tour. There were no implements of any kind and small girls dressed in white knelt near by
waving little fly whisks every time the insects tried to settle on our food. The Tongan serving women carved out endless and generous portions of food and handed them over on leaves. I was soon
surrounded by a mountain of leaves and hardly knew whether to be embarrassed or proud. The Queen gallantly did the best her small appetite would allow and was able to spin it out for some time,
knowing that as the person of highest rank, when she stopped eating everyone else would also have to put down their leaves.

This was a royal visit with a difference, all aspects of our daily routine seemingly on show. Later that evening, intending to make my way over to the bathroom, I found so many prostrate bodies
sleeping on the staircase and in passages that the only means of getting to the bathroom was through Mike’s room. I bumped into the Queen, who was also tiptoeing through Mike’s room.
When she turned on the light in the bathroom she found that its other door had been thrown open to the garden and that she was now in full view of the town and the four hundred or so men who were
sitting around campfires in the garden. Even the next morning, a Sunday, when we had hoped to have a bit of a lie-in, the Queen and Prince Philip were woken at dawn by four men blowing nose flutes
in their honour.

Before we left we were presented with grass skirts and garlands. The men put theirs on rather willingly – and were immediately transformed – and we were amused to note that the
admiral was particularly gifted in the hula motion of the hips. Rather more reserved, we women wore our garlands but carried our grass skirts over our arms. As we said goodbye, Queen Salote had
tears running down her cheeks, and while we settled ourselves in
Gothic
, she and her family sailed five miles out to sea so that they could wave to us as we passed. We took with us the
memory of a surprisingly shy woman who possessed enormous talent, charm and ability, and an island whose people had given us a welcome and hospitality that we would never forget.

It was approaching Christmas, and as we knew we wouldn’t get a chance to celebrate properly once the New Zealand leg began, we had a crazy festive dinner party. Prince Philip excelled
himself, managing to use three cracker blowers at once – one in his mouth and one up each nostril, the shiny rolls unravelling simultaneously. On 23 December, as we docked in Auckland, the
more formal part of the royal tour began. This was also when the private secretaries took over the schedule, each moment timed to within a second of its existence, and what better start, I thought,
than the Governor-General and his wife, who were allocated precisely three minutes on board. There was a busy schedule ahead of us in New Zealand; even Christmas was to be spent on duty. The
morning of Christmas Eve was spent at Auckland Hospital, but the populace was apparently so healthy there had been a certain amount of difficulty filling it up for the visit. In the afternoon the
Queen addressed a crowd of children, which later, in private, she said was a waste of time for the poor children as her speech had been so pompous.

Then tragically, on Christmas Day, there was a terrible rail disaster, the worst in New Zealand’s history. The night express from Wellington to Auckland crashed through a weakened bridge
spanning a river swollen by flood water at Tangiwai. Prince Philip accompanied the prime minister to Wellington to attend the funeral of the victims. The mood was subdued as the Queen made her
Christmas broadcast, and being so far from our families made us all a bit miserable. I thought of my parents, my sister, my nephews and John as the Queen said, ‘Of course we all want our
children at Christmas time – for that is the season above all when each family gathers at its own hearth. I hope that perhaps mine are listening to me now.’ I realised how difficult it
was for her to be apart from her children for so long.

By this point in the tour, I had resigned myself to the repetition of ceremonies. The public welcomes lasted only fifteen minutes, consisting of the national anthem, the presentation of a
bouquet, followed by a gift from the town, the presentation of the town council and local dignitaries, the signing of the town hall visitors’ book and lastly the hip-hooraying or three
cheers. The welcome had been excellently devised to keep the Queen and Prince Philip occupied so that everybody could gaze at them for a quarter of an hour. A civic reception was the same, with the
addition of an address by the mayor and a reply by the Queen, and so lasted around twenty minutes. Everything was formulaic by necessity, and I would find myself looking for something to distract
me such as the entry of an inevitable stray dog or someone’s hat blowing off. Prince Philip always acted as master of ceremonies, prompting the mayor with ‘Would you like to present
your councillors?’ And if both the mayor and the town clerk forgot, he would ask, ‘And are you going to have three cheers?’

One of the strangest phenomena we noticed was crowd laughter. Whenever Prince Philip, or sometimes the Queen, tried to make the ceremony a little more human by talking to one of the people being
presented, the crowd would go into shrieks of laughter. It wasn’t as if Prince Philip had said anything particularly funny – the crowd probably just did so through over-excitement or
nervous strain. The other strange thing was that people being presented to the royal couple had such little expectation of being spoken to that they either rushed away before the Queen or Prince
Philip got a chance to stop them or else they made little sense. Eventually, the laughter so embarrassed Prince Philip, or the person he was trying to talk to, that he felt he had to give up the
practice.

This leg of the tour was busy, the New Zealanders welcoming wherever we went. On our way out to Hamilton I spotted three painted sheep in a field: one red, one white and one blue, and later one
painted red, white and blue. There were signs that made us laugh – ‘God Bless the Queen and Keep an Eye on the Duke’ was my favourite. Driving around, we heard ‘Isn’t
she
lovely
?’ or ‘Isn’t
he
gorgeous?’ or with a screech of delight ‘She waved at
me
!’, but what made us smile was the day that the prime
minister, Sidney Holland, added his car to the long procession and as we crawled through a small town, a man popped his head into his car and exclaimed:
‘Cor!
Bloody old Sid!’ We
visited the chief of the Waikato tribe, enjoyed flowery and poetic Maori welcomes (though sadly we had to leave just as the hakas were starting) and watched in amazement as two great war canoes,
each over a hundred feet long, carrying one hundred chanting warriors, paddled down the river.

We were now a month and a half into the tour and all of the staff were getting tired and crotchety. I don’t know how Prince Philip and the Queen survived, continuing to wave as happily as
they had done since our arrival – indeed, the Queen had developed tremendous muscles in her arm as a result – but they could never relax. On several occasions, when the Queen said to
her husband ‘Look to your right’, wanting to point something out to him, he automatically started waving, even if it was to a rather surprised animal minding its own business in a
field.

At last, in the New Year, we got two very welcome days off at Moose Lodge near Rotorua – happily far enough away from the horrid sulphurous smell left by the eruption of Mount Tarawera
many years before. I spent them catching up with letters both official and personal, waterskiing with Prince Philip and rowing around on the lake. From there, we drove 160 miles to Napier, nearly
half that distance on dirt roads, the dust conjuring memories of the unsurfaced road trip in Kenya. As the Queen and Prince Philip and some of the staff continued onwards by train, Miss Bramford
and I travelled by car to Wellington along beautiful avenues of poplars and weeping willows, and the road seemed so inviting that I asked whether I could take over the wheel. There was so little
traffic and the roads were so wide and open that I made it in record time, keeping to 80 mph all the way. Pleased with my driving prowess, I was somewhat taken aback when the officials at
Government House told me there was a strict 50 mph speed limit throughout New Zealand.

We got through the State Opening of Parliament – I felt ludicrous climbing into a long dress and tiara in broad daylight and suffered a fit of nerves at the formality of the event –
and then left the dairy farms, weird land formations and capital city of North Island for the natural grandeur of the mountains, lakes, glaciers, fjords and sheep farms of South Island. Here the
civic reception was lightened by a little dog that ran out of the crowd, leapt up the steps and, when Prince Philip and the Queen stood during the presentations, jumped up on to one of the vacant
chairs and raised its paw to the crowd as though acknowledging their cheers.

Thankfully, as South Island had many country towns and districts that were inaccessible to our large party, the succession of public welcomes lasted only two days. Most of our remaining time was
spent in Christchurch – English in nature – and Dunedin – Scottish – where we were greeted by pipe bands in full Highland dress.

The New Zealand tour was a great success, excellently planned and efficiently executed. It was nothing short of a miracle that, thanks to Sergeant Footman Oulton, not a single piece of luggage
had been lost from the stacks that we carried around with us. I had kept up pretty well myself, receiving compliments, via Alice, from the Queen, although I had been told off after a very formal
dinner party on
Gothic.
The guests had left the large drawing room but the door was not quite closed. I flopped down on a sofa and exclaimed, ‘What a relief they’ve all
gone!’ The Queen was very stern. ‘Pammy, that may be so. But
not
while they might hear.’ The Queen was always impeccable in her behaviour and demeanour, performing her
duties so perfectly and conscientiously that she always put the rest of us to shame. It was also clear to everyone by now that Prince Philip played an enormous part in the tour’s success. I
loved his mix of teasing and humour with unexpected kindness and thoughtfulness. It was easy to see why he was so tremendously popular wherever we went. At our farewell party in Invercargill, one
of the New Zealand typists said to Alice, ‘The best investment that the royal family has ever made in all its history is the Duke of Edinburgh.’

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