by Tessa Arlen
“Let us remember those who will not come back: their constancy and courage in battle, their sacrifice and endurance in the face of a merciless enemy; let us remember the men in all the services, and the women in all the services, who have laid down their lives. We have come to the end of our tribulation, and they are not with us at the moment of our rejoicing.”
I thought of one man. A man I had known before the war when I had been a silly young thing at university. How enthralled I had been by his attention. How hopeful that this enigmatic soul was as fascinated by me as I had been by him. It had been nearly a year since I had last heard from George Buthlay—fighting with the Indian infantry somewhere near Imphal. I crossed my fingers on my lap that he was listening to this broadcast somewhere in northeast India. I prayed he was sitting back in a comfortable cane chair in the officers’ mess, a glass of cold beer in his hand—safe from harm. We would all know soon enough who would be coming home—and who wouldn’t.
The king’s unemphatic, controlled voice went on to recognize the fight yet to come in East Asia. He halted twice, maybe three times. I lifted my head and saw the tension in Lilibet’s eyes. The watchfulness in Margaret’s. Their anxiety evident when their father spoke on the wireless or before large crowds.
“Let us thank Him for His mercies and in this hour of victory commit ourselves and our new task to the guidance of that same strong hand.”
There was a moment of silence around the table as the king finished his speech.
Bobo was overcome; she had her hanky out and was sobbing into it, to Alah’s disgust. I remembered that Bobo and Ruby MacDonald had lost a brother at the end of September in Arnhem.
Lilibet, with her usual equanimity, summed it up for us. “You know, I think he did really well. I thought he was going to come adrift in the middle, but he didn’t.” She reached out and took Bobo’s hand in hers, holding it as her nursemaid’s sobs receded. “No more crying,” she said. “It’s all over. Just one more round to go in the East.”
“He should limit himself to just a couple of sentences, though,” Margaret said. “Be kinder to us.”
Alah’s iron control vanished. “Yes, thank you, Margaret Rose, that will be quite enough. Bobo, have you and Ruby finished your packing? No, I didn’t think so. We are leaving at half past ten. Please don’t make us late.”
* * *
• • •
The Daimler doors slammed shut, and two Guards, their faces stiff with trying to control their smiles, snapped off their best Victory Day salutes to send us on our way down the Long Walk and away from the castle.
“Goodbye!” Margaret Rose wound down the window and hung out to wave both hands as we drove toward the park.
“Home to Mummy and Papa.” Lilibet smiled. My smile faltered as the image of the palace loomed: we were not going back to the simplicity of the Royal Lodge days, and Buckingham Palace wasn’t my home. A small flint-stone cottage with a slate roof dwarfed by a large mulberry tree was where my mother lived. I saw her sharing a pot of tea with her old friend Betty at her kitchen table. A lump filled my throat, and I turned my head to look out of the window. From the moment we had arrived at Windsor Castle during the Blitz, I had rarely had a chance to spend any length of time with my mother. Would it be possible for me to leave the girls now? To return to my quiet backwater and find a teaching job at the local grammar school? Was there anything left for me in that tiny little village outside Dunfermline, other than my dear mother? And would I perhaps hear from old friends—and George Buthlay—again? I shook my shoulders: You can think about all that tomorrow, Marion. Today the war is over!
“Victory . . . victoreeeee!” Margaret Rose cried out to people walking their dogs in the park. I reached up and pulled her back into the car by the waist of her skirt, kissing her pink cheeks as she pretended to struggle back to her open window.
Our childlike delight lasted until we reached London’s western suburbs. The sight of their broken appearance reduced both the princesses to silence.
“Have we really been away for five years?” Margaret asked me. And I understood how hard the sight of this battered world must be for her. I had left Windsor to go to Scotland for holidays when I could be spared, and I had seen the wreckage wrought by the terrifying years of the Blitz and the V-2 bombs, and even Lilibet had had her time in the Auxiliary Territorial Service in Camberley, but Margaret’s life had been lived exclusively at Windsor, with only a few trips to their aunt Marina at Coppins.
“I can’t seem to recognize familiar landmarks we drove past countless times before the war.” Lilibet’s head was turned away from us as she frowned at the gaps where buildings had once been that were now mounds of dusty rubble. I tapped on the window that divided us from the front of the car. “Is this the way we usually came from Windsor to Buckingham Palace?” My old friend Mr. Hughes, who had met me at King’s Cross station all those years ago, had driven down from the palace to collect us. He exchanged a look with our detective, Mr. Ellis. “Yes, Miss Crawford, it’s the same route we always take.”
“Oh no.” Margaret tugged at her sister’s arm. Lilibet turned and the two of them gazed out of the window as we passed a bombed-out church and what had once been a street of comfortable middle-class Edwardian villas and was now an uneven line of broken brick with an occasional brave house standing erect and miraculously whole. “Do you remember we saw that lady walking five Irish wolfhounds past this church when we were little?” Lilibet nodded and took Margaret’s hand.
“It all looks so broken . . . so desolate.” Lilibet cast an uncertain look back at a ruined steeple and searched street after street for a sign that London was not completely obliterated.
“It’s not too bad here.” Margaret craned her neck through the window as we came up the Cromwell Road. Lilibet, leaning away from us and toward the window on her side of the car, hadn’t said a word since the bombed-out church.
“Look, most of it is still standing. Crawfie, do you remember when you took us on the bus to spend our pocket money at Woolworths?” Margaret looked apprehensive as we passed a mass of broken brick. “Oh no, what happened to Carstairs House? Look, Lilibet, it’s gone, completely gone. Is it all like this?” she whispered. She badly wanted the end of the war to be just that: an end to the blackout, the pretended bravery, the nights spent in the castle bomb shelter in the cellars, and weeks without seeing her parents—not this dismal, dusty, and broken world.
“Poor old London, what a battering she has taken.” Lilibet, overwhelmed by our entry into London’s rubble-strewn inner suburbs, looked across to her sister and saw her tight, scared face. “I know it looks frightening, Margaret, but we will rebuild. Do you see? They have already started there.” Lilibet’s hands were locked tightly together as she searched for more signs of rebirth. “But where are the people living if their houses have been bombed?”
I was ashamed to say that I had no answer for her. “They have probably moved in with their friends . . . or their relatives,” I said.
The window was still open between the back of the car and the front. “Mr. Ellis, do you happen to know how many homes were bombed here, in London?” Lilibet asked the man who had been our detective since 1939. He turned around and considered her for a moment. “An awful lot, I’m afraid, Your Royal Highness, and of course the final count isn’t in yet—won’t be for a while. But they say nearly two million houses were destroyed, and easily more than half of that number were in Greater London.” He paused and glanced at me as if asking how far he should go with these depressing statistics. I nodded for him to continue. I wanted to know too, but more important, the heir to the crown should know what had happened to the capital city of our country. “The East End was very badly hit—especially around the London docks: streets, entire neighborhoods, are uninhabitable now. Gone.” The scenes outside of our window were bad enough. I couldn’t imagine what “gone” would look like.
Lilibet’s eyes widened. “Entire neighborhoods,” she said, grappling with the scope of how families who had lost everything could possibly continue. “But where are the people who have lost their homes living?” Mr. Ellis looked at me for help and shrugged. He had no idea either.
“We’ll ask when we get to the palace. They have all that information,” I said, knowing that this would be the first thing Lilibet would ask her father.
“Don’t be sad, Lilibet.” Margaret put her hand in her sister’s—it was her turn to give sisterly comfort. “It’s all over now. Be happy that it’s all over.”
“Yes, Your Highness, it’s all over now. Time to celebrate!” Mr. Ellis said, but I could tell he knew far more than he was telling us.
All the excitement and enthusiasm for our return to the palace evaporated. “We were safely tucked up at Windsor while all this was going on. I mean, I knew it was bad when I was doing my ATS training in Camberley, but not like this. While we were knitting socks for soldiers and putting on pantomimes for the wool fund, this is what was happening to everyone else.”
The car slowed down in the thick traffic of the Brompton Road, and Margaret turned back to her window, her face screwed up in tight anxiety, as she searched for a reason to celebrate. “Lilibet, do you see? Everything is normal here. Look!” I squeezed her small hand and felt its thankful clasp in mine.
“We are coming up to the palace; we’ll see it any moment now,” I said. The girls leaned forward, looking for familiar landmarks they hoped would still be there.
“Better cut across Green Park, Sid; you’ll never make it down the Mall today. Everyone has come up to town to celebrate,” Mr. Ellis said to Mr. Hughes. “Good Lord above, have you ever seen so many people?” We certainly hadn’t since the king’s coronation. The pavements were packed with flag wavers, standing shoulder to shoulder.
Lilibet put her arm around her sister, her smile radiant. “They are singing ‘Rule, Britannia!’ ” she said.
“Rule, Britannia!” she sang, and Margaret joined in.
“Britannia rules the waves . . .”
Mr. Ellis turned in his seat, and with his hat in his hand sang out with us, and Mr. Hughes in a deep bashful baritone joined in the chorus.
Our song inside the car joined the revelers outside, infusing our tiny, protected world with hope.
We bowled through the open gates into Green Park, slowing so that the car with Alah, Bobo, and Ruby might catch up. “Why do our chauffeurs love to keep in procession formation?” I whispered to Margaret, and she giggled.
As we turned into the side entrance to Buckingham Palace, used by the family, both Margaret and Lilibet gasped. “Oh, Lilibet, look,” cried Margaret, craning her neck. “Look down the Mall. Can you see? It’s thick with people. I can’t believe the crowds. Mr. Hughes, will you slow down? Look, Lil, they are all waving at us.” A sea of fluttering paper Union Jacks, headscarves, hankies, and homemade banners filled our partial view of the Mall.
“How long have they been there?” Lilibet asked.
“As soon as peace was declared, Your Royal Highness. Most of them slept here last night, even through that heavy rain.” Mr. Ellis smiled, no longer apologetic for what had happened to London. “No doubt they’ll be here for days.” He leaned over to Mr. Hughes and muttered inaudible instructions; he was on duty and now had little time for us. Crowds meant poor security. He had his hand on the door handle and was the first to alight as we drew to a halt.
A cordon of policemen was standing along the entrance to Constitution Hill, arms locked, as a mob of near-hysterical people swayed as they sang “Rule, Britannia!” I simply couldn’t help it: my eyes filled, and I had to turn to wipe tears away.
“They are all here to celebrate!” Lilibet looked at me. “Look at them all. They are simply beside themselves.” A sailor half collapsed into the arms of a policeman, who set him on his feet and gave him a pat on the shoulder.
“Even the policemen are celebrating!” said Margaret.
“The Victoria Memorial is thick with them. I can’t see the statue of the old queen.” Mr. Hughes was deeply impressed by the way scores of people had arranged themselves in, on, and around the great marble lap of England’s longest-ruling monarch.
“Here we are! Here we really are!” Margaret cried as three footmen came down the steps of the family’s entrance to the palace.
When they opened the car doors, the noise from the crowds was deafening. Trumpets blared, hunting horns tantivvied, klaxons hooted, but above it all rose the human voice: it shouted, cheered, and sang snatches of whatever song it had heard from its singing neighbors. Its dizzy elation was overpowering.
Lilibet climbed out of the car and stood there for a moment to take it all in. “I want to go out there and be with them,” she shouted over the din to me. “Do you think I might? Do you think Mummy and Papa would let me?”
“And me,” said Margaret as we walked into the part of Buckingham Palace that we had used to call home. “I’m old enough to go too—it’s only fair.”
“Then you must ask them,” I said, knowing how persuasive Margaret would be. “But perhaps it would be a good idea to say hullo and how are you first? Remember, you have hardly seen your parents since Christmas.”
Chapter Six
May 1945
Buckingham Palace, London
Surely they don’t expect two young women to return to nursery life? I stood in the doorway of the palace day nursery, unchanged in five years. The rows of toy cupboards, the fire guard in front of the nursery fire, and two rocking horses by the window were all waiting to be useful again.
“No, no, this will never do. Ring for fresh linen, Ruby. I want all these beds stripped and changed again. And those are not the towels we use.” Alah sniffed. “We don’t use striped towels,” she said in disgust. She directed efforts to unpack trunks of clothes and rang for maids to change the sheets on the narrow white beds the princesses had slept in when they were little girls.
“Would you look at the dust!” Alah ran a finger along a windowsill and inspected its tip. “It will take an age to get this lot straightened up. Oh well, that’s the war, isn’t it? Nothing will ever be the same again.”
I could hear her all the way up the stairs to my suite of rooms next to the schoolroom. A relentless tirade of “What happened to . . . ?”
How many families would stare at one another over the coming months, probably even years, and say, “What happened to us? Nothing will ever be the same.”
And across the world, after the war was fully over and peace had finally been declared in Asia, when would the grief, as families mourned their dead, their lost homes, their way of life, ever cease?
I was drained: exhausted by the monumental catastrophe that one man had caused. A man, it would appear, who had no compassion, or positive vision, for humankind. Who had led the world into hate, fear, and chaotic disaster. I took off my hat in a room that seemed to have become a holding place for an assortment of chairs and threw it on my bed. Our drive through the city had leached the last of my elation that the war was over. London: the crowds, the noise of the city, all had reduced me to a tired woman who yearned for the simplicity and peace of my mother’s cottage and the quiet woods that fringed the River Forth.
Tomorrow I would be ready to celebrate. Tomorrow I would take the girls into the palace gardens and savor the sooty air of London and say, “Home again!” And tomorrow I would tackle Alah, Bobo, and Ruby to resolve the first of their never-ending needs.
I stretched myself full length on my bed and stared up at the ceiling. There was a diagonal crack that hadn’t been there before, and I tried to remember how many times the palace had taken a hit in the past five years. Was it nine? I remembered the queen telling me that a bomb had fallen in the quadrangle when she and the king had been at dinner, blowing glass out of windows and destroying the chapel. But the vast
and ugly old palace was still standing, surrounded by delirious crowds.
My heart had sunk as we had walked long, empty corridors to the nursery and schoolroom wing. How oppressive palace life could be, with its hushed, heavy library silence. It’s not home; it never will be, I thought as I kicked off my shoes. It is a tired, shabby old dump. Built to impress, not to charm or invite you to relax, curl up in a chair, and reread a favorite book. What would my life have been like if I had not stayed on to become the girls’ full-time governess, if I had gone back to Edinburgh at the end of that wonderful summer in 1931? I would have taught in a school, most probably in Glasgow. Taught the deprived children of dockworkers who barely had enough to eat, let alone buy their children the fine library of books that my girls had access to. I would have met someone, a fellow teacher most likely, and married him. I might even have married George Buthlay. I turned my head to the wall, impatient with myself. But you didn’t, did you? I told myself. You chose this, and this is where you are right now. No need to make life bitter with regrets.
Another burst of cheering. Perhaps the king and queen had already gone out on the balcony to wave to the people. I made myself get up from the bed to close the window. My bedroom, sitting room, and schoolroom looked out on the gardens, but I could still hear the singing and cheering from the Mall on the other side of the palace.
“Is it the same, Crawfie?” I turned to find Lilibet standing in my doorway. “My room looks so much smaller. And why are there so many chairs in your sitting room?” Her consideration for my homecoming made me pull myself together.
Was this shabby, unattractive room with its collection of mismatched chairs lined up down the middle really mine? Unlike the nursery, it was terribly dusty. I started to laugh. “Do you know, I have absolutely no idea? Perhaps they forgot you had a governess.”
She smiled and came across the room, and with our arms around each other’s shoulders we looked out on the still green lawns and the overgrown flower beds of what we used to call the back garden. “But what are you doing here, Lilibet? I thought you and Margaret were going out on the balcony with the king and queen to wave to everyone.”
