The Final Curtsey (9 page)

But outside the family she knew that she could not give an inkling that she might be scared. One such occasion was when she had a meeting with Lady Reading, the head of the WVS at Buckingham
Palace during a particularly bad raid. The palace had already been bombed and as they talked the explosions got closer and closer. Lady Reading was renowned as a most formidable woman and was
obviously not the least concerned.

They were ensconced by the big windows overlooking the garden and Queen Elizabeth rather wanted to suggest that it would be sensible to move a little further away from the possible danger of
shattered glass. Lady Reading, however, just went on talking and talking. Afterwards my aunt said that she had to strongly remind herself that she was the Queen of England and couldn’t
possibly show any fear.

I have many memories of my sojourn at Windsor, and the comings and goings of important figures in the war effort. For instance I met the South African Prime Minister, Jan Christiaan Smuts, and I
like to think that decades later when I was introduced to Nelson Mandela that I had rounded the circle as far as South African politics were concerned. But for frivolous reasons I particularly
remember one summer afternoon when we were having tea on a small terrace overlooking the castle rose garden. A long white tablecloth swept to the ground, and the table was set with a silver kettle,
teapot and all the usual paraphernalia. The party comprised the King, the Queen, the Princesses, myself, and my friend Liz Lambart, who, like me, was a bridesmaid to Princess Elizabeth. Liz, a
daughter of the Earl of Cavan, was sharing my shorthand and typing labours.

Suddenly we heard male voices engaged in transatlantic chatter. The King exclaimed: ‘Oh Lord. General Eisenhower and his group are being shown round the castle. I quite forgot. We will all
be in full view when they turn the next corner.’ It was embarrassing because the little terrace was half way up the castle wall and they would have been clearly seen, but unable to descend or
to communicate in any way with the visitors. Thus without another word, and acting as one, the Royal Family dived under the tablecloth. Liz and I, our mouths gaping open, followed fast. We stayed
there until we thought it safe to reappear. Eisenhower must have been over here planning the D-Day landings at that time. If he and his party had looked up towards the terrace they would have seen
a table shaking from the effect of the concerted and uncontrollable giggles of those sheltering beneath it. Years later, on a State Visit to America, the present Queen confessed to the then
President Eisenhower about it and he thought it very funny.

I had normal school holidays from the secretarial college and was able to enjoy my usual visits to Balmoral. By then I was seventeen and considered to be sufficiently grown up to be allowed down
to dinner. One night I witnessed the Royal Family experiencing the personal tragedy of war. We were sitting there when in the middle of dinner one of the Pages came in and whispered in the ear of
His Majesty’s Assistant Private Secretary, Sir Eric Mieville. Sir Eric got up and quietly left the room. Minutes later he returned and whispered to the King. The King then left. There was
silence around the dining room table. Conversation was impossible. We sat silently, imagining all the possible disasters that could have happened. At length it became impossible to stay there and,
with a feeling of relief, the Queen stood up and signalled for us to leave the room. She then hurried to join the King, while we all sat in the drawing room, still shocked into silence. At long
last the King and Queen returned, and the King told us that his brother, Prince George, Duke of Kent, who was an RAF Air Commodore, had been killed in a flying accident when his plane crashed into
a mountain in northern Scotland. The weather had been vile that day; a low mist, rain and an east wind; the worst flying weather. That evening the King and Queen left for London. Seven days later,
after the funeral, the King returned to Scotland and made a pilgrimage to the scene of the tragedy.

There were happier times. Despite the war the King and Queen Elizabeth, particularly the Queen, were absolutely wonderful at making life fun for their daughters and their guests. There was a
game called ‘kick the tin’, customarily played after tea. All the visitors, however grand, had to take part. It involved a great deal of running, climbing in and out of windows and
generally causing mayhem. I remember watching Sir Samuel Hoare, the Lord Privy Seal, being made to run like the devil and becoming very hot, bothered and confused. I try and imagine a similar
holder of high office doing the same nowadays, and I can’t. But Queen Elizabeth was very persuasive.

The membership of the first Balmoral house party for the beginning of the grouse shooting was always the same and included Lord and Lady Eldon and Lord and Lady Salisbury. Lord Salisbury —
‘Bobbety’ to the Royal Family — was a great statesman, but was fortunate, or unfortunate, depending on your point of view, in having his birthday in the middle week of August. At
dinner he would be crowned with staghorn moss and rhymes would be declaimed. Queen Elizabeth was always a leading player in this rather pagan ceremony. During the last stages of dinner we would
belt out the latest hit songs. When she was older, Princess Margaret, who had a satirical wit, would create topical new lyrics for these top of the pops performances. She missed her vocation; she
should have been in cabaret.

Often there were four and sometimes six pipers in attendance, circling the table at the end of dinner before heading off down the passage with the pipes dying gently away. The pipers were two
gamekeepers, a gardener, a pony man and a gate keeper, kilted and plaided in the grey and red Balmoral tartan. One piper was well known to imbibe generously before playing and the unsteady pattern
of his march, let alone his piping, caused a lot of secret amusement. Before dinner one jolly evening, Magdalen Eldon, a well-known practical joker, did some art work on the white marble statue of
Queen Victoria’s beloved Prince Albert, which stood in the corridor outside the drawing room. She applied lipstick, rouge and mascara and the Prince Consort looked awful. The King was clearly
not too distressed by this, although Victoria, had she known would have been furious. It took many hours of hard work to erase the damage, but Albert once scrubbed down resumed his former air of
inscrutable benevolence. These dinners were, however, not without their formality. When the Queen rose to lead the ladies out, they in turn stopped at the door and made a low curtsey to the King,
which he acknowledged with a bow to each one. That doesn’t happen now, of course, as it is the Queen herself who leads the ladies out.

At Balmoral the male members of the Royal Family wear the grey and red Balmoral tartan, designed by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in the 1850s. It was here that I learned my first lesson in
the male anatomy. My mentor was the King’s younger brother, the Duke of Gloucester, who unfortunately never quite mastered the correct technique of adjusting the kilt when seated.

Years and years later, at the annual Ghillies Ball at Balmoral, the Resident Factor, who is responsible for the management of the Balmoral estate, kilted of course, was sitting out one of the
reels on a leather-covered banquette. It was perhaps a little over-warm and when the Queen approached, he had to struggle to rise — slowly and with obvious difficulty. His bare bottom had
stuck to the leather and there was an unexpressed ‘ouch’. He told me afterwards: ‘I only hope that Her Majesty thought the tears in my eyes were due to the emotion I felt at being
addressed by her.’

CHAPTER FOUR

I tiptoed into the world of work with a difference when I finished my shorthand and typing course. I wanted to ‘do my bit’, as the saying then went and join the
Women’s Royal Naval Service, the WRNS, but for a now forgotten reason I found myself in MI6 as a small cog in the shadowy world of espionage. It was all dreadfully hush-hush, and for an
impressionable eighteen-year-old tremendously mysterious. I reported each day with some trepidation to an office disguised as ‘Passport Control’ near St James’s Park underground
station. Perhaps it was ‘Passport Control’ on the ground floor, but upstairs we were MI6. The big chief, ‘M’ to James Bond fans, hid behind the letter ‘C’. He
wrote in green ink, and God-like powers were attributed to him by us underlings. Years later I was told that the spy Kim Philby had at one time been in line for the ‘C’ job. He would
probably have written in red ink. But my boss, a Major Maufe, was an excessively dull character. When forced to make a rare venture into the social circuit and attend a smart cocktail party given
by people he didn’t know, he introduced himself by saying: ‘I’m Maufe’, as in ‘Orf’. The invariable response was: ‘Oh, so sorry you couldn’t stay
longer.’ Thereafter things became a touch confused.

My department co-ordinated the work of our secret agents in the Near East. They all seemed to travel by caique. Then I went to work for the Deputy Director DD/Admin, with a very nice lady whose
husband was an agent and I remember her distress when he broke both ankles dropping by parachute into occupied France. With the ever vigilant Gestapo on their tail, mobility could mean the
difference between life and death to our agents. I never learnt his fate, but I hope so much that he survived. One of my daily tasks was to read every single message transmitted by our spies all
over the world. It was fascinating, but frightening too. I knew all about Germany’s war time race for nuclear weapons being conducted at their heavy water plant in Norway and it was a
tremendous relief when in 1943 a team of British trained Norwegian commandos succeeded in blowing up the plant. The Special Operations Executive described it as one of the most daring and
successful acts of sabotage in the Second World War.

I was also aware of the Peenemunde project on the Baltic coast where the Germans were developing their new secret weapon, a rocket to be launched on London and the south east and the building of
the rocket launching sites in Holland and France, with the aim of bringing Britain to its knees. It was to be Hitler’s last throw. The evidence had been brought to Winston Churchill by his
son-in-law Duncan Sandys who, having been badly wounded in the battle for Norway in 1940 had been made responsible for the search for and the discovery of secret weapons. My husband, Denys Rhodes,
later worked for Duncan Sandys when he was involved in the foundation of the European Movement, a forerunner of the European Community.

In 1943, it was useful, but scary, to know that the V1 and V2 rockets were stoking up long before they actually fell on us. Forewarned was forearmed, and one of the girls with whom I worked and
shared a flat in Chelsea went to bed every night wearing a tin hat. She failed in her attempt to persuade me to take the same precaution. I thought it was carrying personal safety too far. When the
V1 onslaught began it was frightening, mostly because of its total unpredictability – its fall being decided by its petrol tank. The moment one heard the engine noise cease, one knew it had
started its descent. But defiantly nicknaming these death-carrying projectiles ‘Doodle Bugs’ helped to allay the fear and they became just another horror to get used to. I had
first-hand experience of this one Sunday, in June 1944, when I was on duty in ‘Passport Control’ and heard a V1 cut out. It sounded very nearly overhead and stupidly I craned out of the
window to see where it would fall. A rather crusty old colonel saw me as he was passing and rugby tackled me down on to the floor, a rescue operation accompanied by some round curses. That was the
rocket which hit the Guards’ Chapel, in Wellington Barracks, barely a hundred yards away. It was the middle of the morning service. Sixty-three servicemen and women and fifty-eight civilians
were killed. The V2s were even more frightening as they were silent and gave absolutely no warning of their approach. They were like an express train and the noise of the impact when they hit their
target was terrifying. Then of course it was too late for so many innocent victims.

I have often reflected since those momentous days on how curiously adaptable human beings are. At the time all the dangerous situations thrust upon us during the war strangely didn’t
actually seem dangerous; just commonplace. I remember after a weekend in the country arriving back at Victoria station, just after an air raid, and picking my way through piles of shattered glass
and rubble along streets with flaming buildings on each side. One just took it in one’s stride. It was just as well, of course, otherwise life would have been completely intolerable. But
beside the air raids and work there was play. The theatres and cinemas remained open and there were lots of young men around, all in uniform of course. They looked so handsome in their dress
‘Blues’ and as often as not we would end up at the 400 Club, in Leicester Square. It was dark, smoky and romantically mysterious. There was a tiny square dance floor on which we
smooched around, cheek to cheek, imagining ourselves in love.

I had two weeks’ leave a year and usually headed home to Scotland. The trains were slow and packed with servicemen. I would sit bolt upright all night in a third-class compartment, with
the windows blacked out and covered with some sticky protective material in case they were blasted in or out during a raid. The only illumination was a dim blue light in the roof. At Carberry I
found that my mother had risen to the challenge of supplementing the meagre rations with home-grown recipes. We ate stewed nettles both as vegetables and in soup, melted down rose hips and very old
eggs preserved in something called ‘waterglass’. Each adult was entitled under the strict food rationing regime to two small meat cutlets a week; about four ounces of butter and the
same amount of sugar. Fruit was only the home-grown variety and everywhere one looked one could see flower gardens turned into vegetable patches and allotments. We were luckier in the country than
people living in the towns. We could always shoot rabbits or pigeons and many a hen past its laying prime would find its way to the family table. It was a long way from the lavishness of our prewar
picnics and dinners when my parents entertained house parties during the shooting season, but most people, particularly the children, seemed remarkably healthy. Childhood obesity was not then a
problem.