The Final Curtsey (10 page)

Back in London, I and the girls with whom I worked and lived were overwhelmingly affected by the drama of our jobs and were only too ready to see spies lurking round every corner. Those were the
days when people, unbelievably now, regularly reported spotting parachuting nuns, every single sister a spy of course. Liz Lambart and I lived as paying guests in a house in Chelsea. Our landlord
spoke with a heavy foreign accent and limped, although we once caught him running up the stairs. He was often away and something of an enigma. Was he, I wondered, transmitting to Berlin? He would
offer us lifts to work in the morning — how did he get the petrol for his car — and we went to extraordinary lengths to convince him that we worked in a totally different part of
London. We were convinced that he was a spy. We even went as far as reporting him to MI5, although I never found out what happened to him. In retrospect I hope it wasn’t anything too
serious.

Later in the war my mother managed to engineer both my brother Andrew and me into Buckingham Palace as lodgers. I would think that it probably would not have needed much more than a telephone
call to her sister, the Queen. Our new home was wonderfully convenient, because it was, for me, only a short walk across the park to ‘Passport Control’. We had a bedroom each, a sitting
room and a bathroom all on the second floor and a housemaid’s pantry as our kitchen. There was a small electric cooker, but no fridge. I thought it would be a good idea to utilise the window
ledge and so put our milk bottles out there to keep them cool, only to bring down on my head the wrath of the Master of the Household, a dear old boy called Sir Piers Legh, who gave me the most
fearsome ticking off for defacing the architectural purity of the palace facade; as if he didn’t have other things to worry about. The palace had already been bombed nine times, and there
were all those refugee royals passing through, like Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, who having narrowly escaped capture by the invading Germans, arrived with little more than what she stood up
in and a tin hat.

Our window overlooked the forecourt and I don’t suppose my domestic improvisations enhanced the Changing of the Guard. Our great culinary forte was a stockpot which we kept going for
months on end and in which we would pop whole pigeons. There were plenty of them to be had, and cheap at 2s 6d (12.5p) each. I imagine that Trafalgar Square was rather depleted. Once we actually
invited the King and Queen to dinner — imagine in a house maid’s pantry. The horrified staff was convinced that Their Majesties would succumb to food poisoning. The King’s Page,
the tall and elegant Mr Hailey, was particularly distressed about His Majesty slumming in his own palace, and appeared, unasked, to check over our arrangements, which he found highly
unsatisfactory. Buckingham Palace was of course the most prestigious address in town, but it did deter some of my after-dark escorts. The conversations with these hopeful gallants would run
something like this: ‘Can I see you home?’ . . . ‘How kind’ . . . ‘Where do you live?’ . . . ‘Buckingham Palace’ . . . ‘Oh REALLY’, with
an emphasis on the ‘REALLY’ . . . ‘But where do you live?’ . . . ‘Honestly, Buckingham Palace.’ Unfortunately my connection with the big house at the top of the
Mall sometimes dashed my chances of romance. My escorts had to leave me at the Palace railings, where I still had to get past the soldiers and policemen.

I was twenty in 1945. VE Day was a euphoric moment. I was still at the Palace and that evening we had a huge party. My eldest brother, John, who had been a prisoner of war, was there and a gang
of us, including the two Princesses, were given permission by the King and Queen to slip away anonymously and join the rejoicing crowds on the streets. This sort of freedom was unheard of as far as
my cousins were concerned. There must have been about sixteen of us and we had as escort the King’s Equerry, a very correct Royal Navy captain in a pinstriped suit, bowler hat and umbrella.
No one appeared less celebratory, perhaps because he took his guardian responsibilities too seriously. Princess Elizabeth was in uniform, as a subaltern in the Auxiliary Transport Service –
the ATS. She pulled her peaked cap well down over her face to disguise her much photographed image, but a Grenadier among the party positively refused to be seen in the company of another officer,
however junior, who was improperly dressed. My cousin didn’t want to break King’s Regulations and so reluctantly she agreed to put her cap on correctly, hoping that she would not be
recognised. Miraculously she got away with it.

London had gone mad with joy. We could scarcely move; people were laughing and crying; screaming and shouting and perfect strangers were kissing and hugging each other. We danced the Conga, a
popular new import from Latin America; the Lambeth Walk and the Hokey-Cokey, and at last fought our way back to the Palace, where there was a vast crowd packed to the railings. We struggled to the
front, joining in the yells of ‘We want the King; we want the Queen’. I rather think the Equerry got a message through to say that the Princesses were outside, because before long the
double doors leading onto the balcony were thrown open and the King and Queen came out, to be greeted by a rising crescendo of cheers, to which their daughters and the rest of us contributed. It
was a view of their parents that the Princesses had never before experienced and for all of us young people it was the grand finale to an unforgettable day. I suppose that for the Princesses it was
a unique burst of personal freedom; a Cinderella moment in reverse, in which they could pretend that they were ordinary and unknown.

After that life returned to what passed for normal in those days. In mid-July the lights went on again ‘all over the town’, as the popular song had it. After more than two thousand
nights of the black-out and dim out, Britain was once again ablaze with light, and there was no excuse for bumping into trees or each other in the dark, drunk or sober. Many people listened on the
wireless to the news of the continuing war against Japan, culminating in the ultimate horror of atom bombs vaporising Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on 6 and 9 August 1945. There has since been a
revisionist view of those two raids, but I think at the time the great mass of the people, weary of war, were overwhelmingly relieved that it was at last ending and were not overly concerned at the
time about the moral argument. That was to come later. Four days after the second raid Japan surrendered unconditionally to the Allies. Prince Philip of Greece, second in command of the destroyer
HMS Whelp
, was present in Tokyo Bay for the formal Japanese surrender.

On VJ Day – victory over Japan – we were all out on the streets again in full party mood. It was yet another riot of song and dance and once again I was with the Princesses. I
can’t remember exactly what we got up to, and so the Queen has provided me with an aide memoire taken from her diary entries for that time. She starts on 6 May 1945: ‘Heard that John
and George free and safe!’ The exclamation mark probably expresses her pleasure at the return from captivity of my brother John and her paternal cousin, Viscount Lascelles, the elder son of
Mary, the Princess Royal, and the Earl of Harewood. Then on 7 May: ‘After tea saw John and George who flew back today. John just the same.’ On VE Day, 8 May: ‘PM announced
unconditional surrender. Sixteen of us went out in crowd, cheered parents on balcony. Up St J’s St, Piccadilly, great fun,’ followed on 9 May by: ‘Out in crowd again —
Trafalgar Square, Piccadilly, Pall Mall, walked simply miles. Saw parents on balcony at 12.30 am — ate, partied, bed 3 am!’

There is a gap until 14 August when she recorded the Prime Minister announcing the complete surrender of Japan, followed on 15 August: ‘VJ Day. Out in crowd, Whitehall, Mall, St J St,
Piccadilly, Park Lane, Constitution Hill, ran through Ritz. Walked miles, drank in Dorchester, saw parents twice, miles away, so many people’ and finally, on 16 August: ‘Out in crowd
again. Embankment, Piccadilly. Rained, so fewer people. Congered into house [a reference to Buckingham Palace and that rather wild dance] . . . Sang till 2 am. Bed at 3 am!’

My cousins were obviously having the time of their lives. Meanwhile I had been making occasional forays to Windsor where the Queen arranged rather more sedate small dances for her daughters,
attended by young Guards’ officers stationed at the castle and in the town’s barracks. Queen Mary, rather wryly, called these boys ‘the bodyguard’. Princess Elizabeth
dutifully waltzed, foxtrotted and quickstepped, and engaged her partners in small talk, but she was waiting for one man to come home from the war. She had been enamoured of Prince Philip of Greece
from an early age. I’ve got letters from her saying: ‘It’s so exciting. Mummy says that Philip can come and stay when he gets leave.’ She never looked at anyone else. She
was truly in love from the very beginning.

With total peace came some sobering statistics which told the price of victory and defeat. I read that over 55 million people were killed, from all sides. Then there were the spine chilling
images filmed when the concentration camps were liberated. A world food shortage brought the return of rationing on a near wartime basis and there were long queues at food shops. The winter of 1947
blew in with heavy snow storms and sub-zero temperatures, meaning serious fuel shortages and power cuts. A frozen Britain lived and worked by candlelight. So the wedding of Princess Elizabeth to
Philip Mountbatten, newly minted as a British subject, in November that year, brightened our austerity-ridden post-war world. This time I was on the Palace balcony myself, as a bridesmaid, standing
between Princess Margaret and another cousin, Diana Bowes-Lyon, gazing down on the crowds, who from that distance seemed Lilliputian. Our dresses were designed by Norman Hartnell. They were of
ivory satin and net silk tulle, embroidered with syringa flower motifs. We bridesmaids didn’t have a girl’s party on the wedding eve as they do now, but we did, on the wedding day
itself, have an evening party hosted by the best man, David Milford Haven. He was perhaps not the most attentive of hosts and it was not a great success: anyway we were probably all too
exhausted.

There were eight bridesmaids, the traditional number for a royal bride. We flitted round the red carpeted corridors of the Palace waiting for the cars to take us to Westminster Abbey and I
remember waving to the crowds. It was very exciting but I was shocked to learn that the price of a window view in buildings overlooking the processional route could cost up to ten guineas a head, a
lot of money in those days. I know that there were some last-minute crises. The bride’s bouquet disappeared. A footman remembered taking it in and bringing it upstairs, but no one had seen it
since. With the panic at its height he suddenly recalled putting it in a cool cupboard to keep it fresh — and there it was.

Then Princess Elizabeth decided she wanted to wear the double string of pearls which had been a personal wedding gift from her father and mother. The pearls could not be found either, but
someone remembered that they had been sent over with the rest of the wedding presents for public display at St James’s Palace, half a mile away. The Princess’s Private Secretary, Jock
Colville, was dispatched post-haste and he commandeered the car of the King of Norway almost before he got out of it. At St James’s the detectives guarding the gifts thought he was telling
them a tall story, but after some while he convinced them and returned clutching the pearls with only minutes to spare. There was a third mishap. The frame of the sun-ray tiara lent to the Princess
by the Queen as ‘something borrowed’ snapped as it was being fitted on her head, and the Crown Jeweller, who was standing by in case of any emergency, rushed to his workroom with a
police escort and repaired it just in time. Regrettably I lost my lovely dress in a house move.

I left my MI6 job soon after the end of the war, and thereafter spent a lot of time trying to find new and interesting employment. Eventually I pulled off an interview with the fledgling
European Movement. I was invited to lunch at the Jardin des Gourmets restaurant in Soho to meet my putative employers. One introduced himself as Denys Rhodes. It was the start of an exciting and
romantic adventure which was to take me to the top of the world — and down again.

CHAPTER FIVE

Denys Rhodes was six years older than me and very much a man of the world. His father, Major Arthur ‘Tahu’ Rhodes, of the Grenadier Guards, was a New Zealander, a
member of one of the earliest settler families, once the owners of vast tracts of land in the South Island. Denys was born in Ireland where his mother’s family had roots in the Irish
judiciary, the higher reaches of the Church of Ireland and a touch of the ‘Beerage’ because of their links with the aristocratic Guinness brewing family. My mother-in-law, Helen, known
as Nellie, was the daughter of Lord Plunket, who had been Governor of New Zealand during the reign of King Edward VII. He bore the standard of the Dominion of New Zealand at the coronation of King
George V. Helen, whose mother was a daughter of the 1st Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, and ‘Tahu’ the Maori name with which he was christened, met while Lord Plunket was at Government
House.

Denys was sent to Harrow where he was thought rather clever and then to Grenoble University. As a young man Denys joined the Westminster Rifles, part of the TA, and when the Second World War
broke out he enlisted in the 60th Rifle Brigade, fighting across North Africa and Italy, where he was wounded and brought home. After he was demobilised he was taken on by Randolph Churchill, the son of the wartime
premier, Winston Churchill, as a sort of unofficial ADC for a lecture tour of America. Randolph was a successful writer but not so successful a politician. They had met during the war. Randolph has
often been portrayed as having had a serious drinking problem, and it was rather a kill or cure trip. They survived many misadventures, dug each other out of several holes, but ended up on
reasonably amicable terms. Denys helped him in his campaign when he contested the Devonport parliamentary constituency in 1950. He was narrowly defeated and it was his fourth failed attempt to get
into parliament.