The Final Curtsey (6 page)

Tug of war. Princess Elizabeth at the front, then Princess Margaret and then me

Princess Elizabeth’s governess was Marion ‘Crawfie’ Crawford, who was introduced to the Duke and Duchess of York by another of my aunts, Lady Rose Leveson Gower. She was very
nice really, but then she wrote that sugary book about the childhood of Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret, which so upset Queen Elizabeth, who could not even begin to contemplate that anyone
should commit such a breach of trust. Looking back over the years it was pretty innocent stuff, but in those days different standards applied. I haven’t read it, and I don’t think I
shall.

Princess Elizabeth and I were really the last generation of girls from families like ours who didn’t go to school. I thought school would be ghastly; you’d have to play hockey. I
didn’t want to play hockey. I did, however, have dancing lessons and I was at the dancing school in Edinburgh the day the abdication of King Edward VIII was announced. To my eternal shame I hopped around the room chanting: ‘My uncle
Bertie is going to be King.’ Very soon afterwards ‘Uncle Bertie’ became ‘Sir’. Princess Elizabeth became Heiress Presumptive, the ‘Presumptive’ inserted
just in case she later had a brother. I believed she hoped she might have one and be let off the hook, but deep down she knew that wasn’t very likely. She accepted that she would be Queen one
day, but thought it was a long way off. Sadly it came to her much sooner than she expected.

Much has been written and said about the so-called bad blood between Queen Elizabeth and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, but not once in all the years I was with my aunt — not once
— did I ever hear her say anything remotely unpleasant about them. Becoming Queen was not what she wanted, or expected, but when it happened she accepted it, calling it ‘this
intolerable honour’ and became the most successful Queen Consort in the history of the British monarchy.

Many years later, when the Windsors’ house in Paris was restored after the death of the Duchess, a collection of Christmas cards from Queen Elizabeth was discovered, each of them inscribed
affectionately, giving the lie to the popular view that my aunt bore a deep rooted grudge towards the Duke and Duchess for precipitating her husband into sovereignty, and therefore because of the
stresses and strains involved, particularly during the war, prematurely ending his life. Strangely these cards and other correspondence were found in the Duke’s bath. Apparently, American
style, he always used the shower. Tellingly the only card which retained its envelope was from a rather second rank royal who shall be nameless. It was addressed to ‘Their Royal Highnesses,
the Duke and Duchess of Windsor’. The Duchess, of course, was never granted royal status and was buried at Windsor in a coffin with a brass plate inscribed ‘Wallis, Duchess of
Windsor’.

Guests at Carberry. The King and Queen and Princess Margaret watch participants in the game
‘Are you there Moriarty?’.
My mother stands next to her sister,
Queen Elizabeth, and in the background can be glimpsed the royal nanny, Clara Knight, known as Allah

My memories of Queen Elizabeth started when I was about five with my annual visits to Birkhall, on the Balmoral estate. The house dates from the eighteenth century, and since 1930 it had been
lent by King George V to the Duke and Duchess of York to use when the Royal Family migrated to Scotland for their summer and early autumn holiday. When I was very young I told the King and Queen
that if I ever married I would love to spend my honeymoon there and when I did get married, to Denys Rhodes, a cousin of Patrick Plunket, in 1950, they angelically remembered and let us have the
house for two weeks, generously installing a cook as well. Three years earlier Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip spent part of their honeymoon there too. My cousin wrote to me from Birkhall, two
weeks after her marriage describing its beauty under the December snows, the peace and quiet and how the local people left them undisturbed. ‘Scots are nice that way,’ she said. There
were shooting outings, but the stalkers who, because of the eccentricity of their attire resembled a very mixed rag bag, rather took the Princess aback. ‘We were,’ she said,
‘confronted with the most scurvy-looking lot of ruffians that I have ever seen!’ Thereafter, having found her army boots and leather jerkin, ‘I looked more in keeping with
everyone else.’ She added: ‘I couldn’t help wishing that a photographer would come along, just for once, as he would never have believed what he saw! I imagined that I might be
like a female Russian commando leader followed by her faithful cut-throats, all armed to the teeth with rifles.’

The seclusion of Birkhall was in strong contrast to the first part of her honeymoon which was spent at Broadlands, the Hampshire home of Earl Mountbatten, where she and Philip had little escape
from a curious press and public; the crowds arriving on foot, by car and by motor coach, besieging Romsey Abbey, where they attended morning service on the first Sunday of their week’s stay.
Those who couldn’t get inside climbed on tombstones, and propped ladders and chairs against the walls so as to peer through the windows. One family, it was reported, even carried their
sideboard into the churchyard and stood on it to watch the couple at prayer. Others queued for a chance to sit in the pew occupied a short while earlier by Royalty.

The Princess in her letter told me that although she liked Broadlands, ‘we were terribly pestered by the Press, and, of course, our going to church at Romsey Abbey was a most vulgar and
disgraceful affair’. However she was obviously content with the state of matrimony and in a postscript wrote: ‘I’m blissfully happy, in case you weren’t aware of the fact
and I’m enjoying being married to the best and nicest man in the world.’

Birkhall is a very special place and the greatest fun of the whole year was my annual childhood visit to join Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret. The garden descended steeply to the river
Muick and sometimes we would picnic on an island in the river. I remember a rather sick-making contest to see how many slices of brown bread and golden syrup we could eat. My record was twelve
slices and I always won with ease which is not really a matter to be proud of. Princess Elizabeth, just ten months younger than me, was a natural playmate. We endlessly cavorted as horses, which
was her idea. We galloped round and round. We were horses of every kind: carthorses, racehorses, and circus horses. We spent a lot of time as circus horses and it was obligatory to neigh. Another
game was called ‘catching happy days’. This involved catching the leaves falling from the trees. There was a gramophone and just one record, either ‘Land of Hope and Glory’
or ‘Jerusalem’. I can’t remember which, but we played it all the time. Princess Margaret used to keep me awake at night as I was given the next door bedroom. The walls were very
thin and Margaret would sing ‘Old Macdonald Had a Farm’ which goes on and on with its refrain of animal noises. It was an incessant chant and I prayed that she would exhaust herself and
fall asleep. We used our imaginations and were easily amused. How we passed our time must seem extraordinarily unreal to the present generation of computer game children, who only seem happy with
much more sophisticated pursuits.

In childhood, the only time I can recall Princess Elizabeth pulling rank was when we squabbled over the ownership of a wooden seat outside the front door of Birkhall. Territorially she claimed
it declaring: ‘I’m the biggest “P” for Princess’. I don’t know why, but my aunt had somehow acquired the nickname ‘Peter’, bestowed by my eldest
sister, Elizabeth, and was regularly addressed as such by the close family. Queen Elizabeth and the King would always come up to the nursery, no matter how busy they were, to tuck up their
daughters and kiss their children goodnight. The Queen was sheer magic with her children, as she was with the public, particularly during the Second World War air raids, when as a great unifying
force, she was described by a patriotic media as ‘the Queen of the Blitz’.

Setting out for the coronation, 1953. I was pregnant with my second daughter, Victoria

I was particularly put out because a girl I knew of my own age, who had a tiny drop of Royal blood, was attending in a lovely long dress. However on the morning of the great day I was taken to
Buckingham Palace, kitted out in my best pink coat with a velvet collar, where I had breakfast with my cousins and was then taken along the corridor to see the King and Queen in their finery. The
King was wearing a white shirt, breeches and stockings and a crimson satin coat and the Queen a wonderful be-sequined long dress. Then a Page came in and said it was time for the Princesses to go
down to the Grand Entrance where their carriage was waiting. My only other memory of the coronation was looking out of a window of the palace and watching the procession of the Indian maharajahs
and princes, their tunics, coats and turbans encrusted with diamonds worth a king’s ransom. They looked wonderfully grand and romantic. Even the horses pulling their carriages were clad in
the most gorgeous tack and over seventy years on the memory of that fantastic procession remains vivid.

The 1937 coronation was the last enactment of British style pomp and circumstance before Europe was plunged into war. Princess Elizabeth recorded her day in a lined exercise book, neatly tied
round with a piece of pink ribbon and with a touching dedication inscribed in red crayon on the cover. It read: ‘The Coronation, 12th May 1937, to Mummy and Papa, in memory of their
coronation, from Lilibet by Herself. An Account of the Coronation.’ It is preserved in the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle and its ingenuous freshness has lost nothing by the passing of the
years, setting the scene in my view more effectively than the prose of official historians. I got a small mention on the last page.

I did make it to the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, sixteen years later, as one of the privileged 8,000 that had been invited to the Abbey. We all received a list of do’s and
don’ts from the Earl Marshal, the Duke of Norfolk, the choreographer of the occasion, including notes of what we should wear. I was pregnant with my second daughter, Victoria, but contrived
to match up by wearing my wedding dress cunningly let out around the waist. My husband Denys of course came too in the full dress uniform of the Rifle Brigade. Throughout the ceremony we sat on
stools stamped with the royal cypher, and were allowed to take them away as souvenirs. One is now, a touch
lèse majesté,
in the loo and the other in my bedroom. We had to get
there hours before the action started and were rigidly enclosed. At the time I wondered about the predicament of the more elderly peers and peeresses when nature beset them.