The Final Curtsey

by Margaret Rhodes

  I found that the only way I could cope was to live life as we had before the blow struck, at least as far as it was humanly possible. We were four or five hours driving time from either of our families and I wanted to move closer to London. Money was limited and finding a suitable property was difficult. We looked at various houses to rent but they were all much too expensive. At this stage Denys was comparatively well and he insisted that I should go as usual in October to Balmoral. Dear Mrs Mallett came in to look after him while I was away. I have related how the Queen offered us my present home in the Great Park at Windsor. It was positively the most wonderful thing to happen. The rent was within our scope, and it meant that we would be near my sister Jean, and my aunt, Queen Elizabeth.

  I am everlastingly grateful to the Queen for enabling it to happen, and I have lived there longer than I have anywhere else, surrounded by the memorabilia collected during a long and happy life. Every photograph, every painting, every piece of furniture tells a story. My immediate surroundings are not in any way grand, although there is grandeur up the road. You can’t see the castle from where I live, but it’s good to know that it’s there, over the horizon and inhabited by people who have been so kind to me.

  We took possession of the Garden House in April 1981 and in my efforts to make life relatively normal I took Denys to a little cottage we had previously rented at Cap d’Antibes. Shaun Plunket, younger brother of Patrick, and his wife came to stay, and I hope that it made Denys feel that life could go on and that one could still have happy moments. We had a quiet peaceful time, lay in the sun, and shopped in the local market.

  Back home, Denys was admitted to the Princess Christian Hospital in Windsor so that his condition could be monitored. He slowly began to drift away. I sat with him, held his hand and kept assuring him that I was there. He would nod, without opening his eyes, and then suddenly he wasn’t there any more. He died in October 1981. It was the end of thirty-one very special and loving years. But what is love and how on earth does one know whether this one person is the one you wish to spend the whole of the rest of your life with? It is a terrifyingly difficult question. But when the love arrow strikes there is only a complete certainty that it is the right and natural thing to do. Luckily I can look back on three decades of unalloyed happiness. Even after my many years of widowhood I can relive countless happy memories. Not least of these are, of course, the children. They are my pride and joy, although it is now funny to experience a role reversal in which they now look after me and try to tell me what I can and can’t do, just occasionally generating a spark of rebellion.

  Family is supremely important. I never knew my paternal grandparents as they died before I was born. My father had one brother and one sister who never married. So during my childhood there were no relations on my father’s side of the family. But my Strathmore grandmother had ten children, so there were a great many cousins from that clan. Fortunately for me, my mother’s youngest sister’s eldest child, Princess Elizabeth, coincided almost exactly in age with me, my mother’s youngest. It has been my greatest good fortune to have been with my cousin through her childhood years and later as Queen. We are now both old ladies, but she is an amazing person in so many ways and I am sure that history will mark her out as an exceptional sovereign.

  She has led her country unerringly through several difficult periods. She is pragmatic and able to see clearly what line to take when others have been less sure. I admire her with all my heart. But she is also a human being, a mother, daughter and sister and I fully understand the hurt that must have been caused by the marriage failures of her three eldest children. I only hope the nation does too. I clearly believe that after sixty years of being Sovereign, she has seldom put a foot wrong. She has always put the good of the nation first and it is reassuring to know that we will have her son and grandson following in her footsteps.

  CHAPTER SIX

  On Top of the World

  The wild, the remote and an element of danger have always beckoned, but I never imagined that when Denys and I received an invitation to the wedding of the Crown Prince of Sikkim in the Spring of 1963 it would set off a chain of adventures which would lead to us being arrested and detained in a very nasty coup in the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan — or that our companion in this frightening episode would be Shirley MacLaine, the American film star.

  The wedding invitation was on cream-coloured hand-rolled rice paper, littered with gold coats of arms and other insignia. Officially it came from the Maharajah, or King of Sikkim, but I suppose Denys’ friend from his bachelor days, Her Highness, Princess Pema Yapshi-Pheunkhang, the daughter of the King who had stayed with us the previous year, was really behind it. She was known as Cocoola and was married to a Tibetan whose family was descended from a Dalai Lama. The bridegroom was her brother, His Highness Gyalsay Palden Thondup Namgyal — Thondup to his friends. He was marrying as his second wife a twenty-two-year-old American socialite called Hope Cooke. His first wife had been a Tibetan, who had produced two sons and then died giving birth to a daughter. The two boys, who were educated in England, had become our wards back in England.

  But back to that wedding invitation. We had never met Cocoola’s brother and common sense told us that to travel 5,000 expensive miles to attend the marriage of a total stranger was idiocy. But would we ever again get the opportunity to experience a Buddhist royal wedding ceremony in the heart of the Himalayas? Would it not be almost criminal to turn it down? So against our better judgement we accepted and mid-April found us flying to India. Denys had the foresight to get a doctor’s chit identifying him as an alcoholic, so that in ‘dry’ Bombay we might be able to buy some booze. We had stopovers in Calcutta, Delhi and Agra and were lucky enough to see the Taj Mahal, the world’s greatest monument to love, by full moonlight. The white marble mausoleum, built by the Emperor Shah Jehan to contain the tomb of his favourite wife, seemed to float in the silver light and it was a thousand times more beautiful than I had ever dreamt.

  The next lap, by an internal flight, was to Bagdogra, over the seemingly endless dry brown plains of India. We touched down at the very foot of the Himalayas and on disembarking were presented with the first of many white silk scarves, the gift of which ascribed to the recipient the blessings of long life and purity. The polite and correct response was to return the scarf to the donor, but nobody told us that and we returned home with a trunk load of them. Still, a scarf is always useful especially one with special properties. The electrifying drive, as passengers in a Sikkim version of a jeep, to the capital Gangtok was mostly through thick jungle but with hairpin bends and sheer drops. We frequently met Indian Army convoys, the lorries driven by Sikhs with total abandon and disregard for what might be coming in the opposite direction. There were regular checkpoints at which every conceivable scrap of information contained in our passports was painstakingly copied by hand.

  But at last the jungle thinned and climbing over two thousand feet we were enchanted to glimpse the first houses of Gangtok clinging to the precipitous slopes, the curved blue and green roofs shining in the sun. We went straight to the guest house which came complete with an imposing Sikkimese servant whose long hair was braided round his head. After dinner that evening our friend Cocoola called in with her brother, the bridegroom. He was charming, shy and serious and came bearing the gifts of hard liquor, pouring every kind of drink down our throats, which after ‘dry’ India was convivially therapeutic.

  The next morning we were escorted to the palace to pay our respects to the King. It was small — as palaces of my acquaintance go — and reminded me of a Scottish shooting lodge but with brilliantly coloured carvings on the facade. I was bringing a message of good wishes from our Queen to their King, who met us on the doorstep. He was a tiny man, but somehow impressive and he led us into a reception room furnished with heavily brocaded sofas and chairs, the sort of thing you might have found in a five-star French hotel in the days of the belle époque. The only thing missing were the potted palms
. We sat rather nervously on the edge of our chairs and having conveyed my loyal greetings, I made polite conversation. Then suddenly the King said: ‘Would you like to see my paintings?’ I imagined a collection of Old Master works, like those which decorated the interiors of Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle, but he led us to a small room covered floor to ceiling with strange, brightly coloured representations of mountains. They were without light or shade, or perspective. Rainbow shapes, whorls, circles and intricate patterns flared across the skies and His Majesty explained that these were symbols of the spirits, which he could see, but which — and he was very apologetic about this — we couldn’t!

  The dominant painting was of an immense snow-capped mountain, with an awe-inspiring figure bestriding the peak. This, the King explained, in quite matter of fact tones, was the Yeti — what we call the Abominable Snow Man — which always visited him on the 29th of every month. Sometimes this visitation took the form of a wild animal, but when the Yeti was in a good mood it wore golden armour.

  We struggled to say the right thing, but mercifully, on that bizarre note he ushered us out of his very own National Gallery. Cocoola told us that the Yeti was intensely real to the people of Sikkim. Part spirit, part beast, it made a strange whistling noise which she imitated. Evidence of its existence was to be found in the high pastures where the bodies of yaks could be discovered, their necks twisted round and their huge horns embedded in the ground. Yaks are big animals and this was something that no human being could do. We spent a couple of days sightseeing, and we were later shown the chapel in the palace garden, where the Dalai Lama took refuge when he escaped from Tibet over the Nathu La pass, away from the invading Chinese.

  However, it soon began to dawn on us that chaos loomed over the wedding arrangements. A large contingent of ambassadors was due from Delhi, plus an equally large number of Indian Maharajahs and a crowd of the bride’s American relations. But there was no one, apart from the immediate Sikkimese royal family, capable of organising anything like a royal wedding. My only experience of such an event had been that of Princess Elizabeth, sixteen years earlier, and then my role had been solely decorative. George VI had solved his guest accommodation problem by putting most of them up in Claridges and picking up the bill, but in faraway Sikkim it was all hands to the pumps as they say.

  We soon set ourselves to work, ferrying bed clothes, curtains, carpets, cushions, towels, soap, champagne, whisky, flowers, even copious supplies of disinfectant to a village of bamboo huts called bashas where the ambassadors and the American VIPs were to stay. The Maharajahs were to be installed for the duration in an ugly newly built block of flats, appropriately called Elephant Mansions. We organised a press reception with lots of liquor and a rather more restrained Corps Diplomatique reception to appease the ambassadors who were complaining because insufficient attention was being paid to them.

  We assumed the roles of Master of the Royal Household, Equerries, Ladies-in-Waiting and Footmen. Drawing on my memories of grand affairs at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle we ensured that tablecloths were cleaned and ironed, drew up seating plans; arranged the flowers, polished and counted the glasses and plates; kept pork away from the Muslims and the strong stuff from the drunks. We dished out birds’ nest soup, sea slugs, tripe, octopi and a great many other things the ingredients of which we were only too happy to be ignorant about. And all this gluttony was before the wedding day itself.

  The ceremony itself was pure theatre, the curtain rising on a scene of great splendour. I was in my most elegant Ascot outfit, and Denys wore a tail coat and top hat. The American women looked as if they had stepped straight out of a Hollywood movie: Central Casting would have been proud. But the Sikkimese and Indian women outshone us westerners, shimmering in saris of brocade, gold and silver lamé, floating chiffon and gleaming satin. Top hats mixed with turbans and fezzes and the Sikkimese royal family resembled jewelled Fabergé ornaments. The King and the bridegroom were in stiff, brocaded gold coats, and the bride was in white, with a silver lamé cloak, her dark hair piled high. The jewellery which decorated all these people must have been priceless, but the congregation also included many poor Tibetan refugees who had settled in Sikkim.

  The chapel was illuminated by hundreds of little butter-fuelled lamps. The bride and bridegroom sat cross-legged on a high dais and to put the demons to flight a Llama band blew trumpet fanfares louder than any Joshua ever knew. Important parts were played by ‘the Man of the Earth Serpent Year’ followed by ‘the Boy of the Water Dragon Year’ and ‘the Lady of the Iron Horse Year’, to mention just three invocations of divine symbolism. There were lots of prayers and the bride lit the sacred lamp before the altar of the Lord Buddha. Heaven knows what the American guests made of it all, and, as I overheard one confused blonde remark: ‘We just don’t do it this way on Rhode Island.’

  The palace gardens were festooned with coloured lights draped from tree to tree. One very large tree was unadorned and we were warned not to go too close, because the spirit of an old man lived there and did not wish to be disturbed. Regardless of this injunction one of the King’s grandsons, about ten years old, kicked the trunk, saying that he didn’t believe in all that rubbish. We learned the next morning that his kicking leg was so badly swollen that he couldn’t walk. The spirit of the old man had obviously been seriously discomfited. The palace doctor was baffled, but then the Buddhist version of a witch doctor was summoned to do his stuff; cast a spell and lo and behold the princeling rose from his bed and walked. Were we, I pondered, in a land of miracles?

  The religious ceremony at last over, four full days of partying began. A smart Bombay band had been imported and played up to the minute European rock and roll. It was strange to see the Sikkimese and the Tibetans gyrating away like mad, the girls as graceful as reeds. Even the little old King took to the floor. The kilted palace guard was on duty, and like all good mountain men they had a pipe band. Someone suggested, certainly not me, that an exhibition Eightsome Reel should be performed. The Gangtok school mistress, Martha Hamilton, a Scotswoman far from home, and I were the only guests who knew how to dance it, but all I can say is that it was nothing like the Ghillies ball at Balmoral. The pipers never quite achieved the right time, and the gentlemen participants were all Indian generals who had taken full advantage of the liberal liquid refreshments. Total chaos ensued and I hoped that the audience thought we were a comedy turn. My partner was a towering Sikh and we made a right spectacle of ourselves. I was thankful that no other Scots were present to witness my disgrace. Sadly, despite a wedding heavy with religion and mysticism Thondup and his wife divorced in 1980, and although he did his best, he also had a rough ride as King. By the early 1970s there were rumblings in the political rank and file, demanding the removal of the country’s ancient monarchy and the establishment of a more democratic government. I suppose it was inevitable, but in 1975 Sikkim became the twenty-second state in the Indian Union and the authority of its King was removed. Thondup died a heartbroken and lonely man.

  But that was all in the then-unknown future, and before we left we were introduced to the Prime Minister of Bhutan, Jigme Dorji, who made a tentative suggestion that the following year we might visit his country. It was next door to Sikkim and not long before had been an enclosed sort of Shangri-La; the last place on the roof of the world, isolated and only possible for strangers to enter as guests of either the King or the Prime Minister.

  Jigme Dorji was quite enthusiastic, but it was a fateful encounter. Over the next twelve months plans went ahead for our Bhutan exploration, the correspondence being conducted directly with the Prime Minister. The arrangements were progressing well, but one morning, sitting having breakfast in our dining room in Devon, Denys picked up The Times and was horrified to read a report that Jigme Dorji had been assassinated. That very morning we had received a letter from him saying he was looking forward to welcoming us to Bhutan. Very spooky. We assumed that our trip would now be impossible, but after a gap of a fe
w weeks we received a signal from the new Prime Minister, Lhendup Dorji, that it could go ahead. Under the hereditary system in Bhutan he had succeeded his murdered brother in office.

  We flew to Calcutta and spent two nights with a married couple of our acquaintance. They had a large house and garden, and a swimming pool that appeared to be filled with warm green soup. Perhaps our hosts were suffering from a lack of chlorine. Our next destination was once again Sikkim, for a trek into the high western country, which started in the autumn. Since our wedding visit the old King had died and Thondup had succeeded him. By coincidence he was flying in from Zurich and met us in the VIP lounge at Calcutta airport. On the way to the airport, we passed a huge advertisement announcing in three-feet-high scarlet letters: ‘Blood, urine, sputum and pus examined here’ – a charming thought to carry with us.

  Together with our host we then boarded the flight to Bagdogra in the foothills of the Himalayas. After a few ceremonies we set off in Thondup’s Mercedes sports car for the palace escorted by a Jeep load of Sikkim guardsmen. The police commissioner led the cavalcade, waving a red flag to warn all other drivers off the road. At each Sikkimese village along the way Thondup’s procession stopped for ceremonies of welcome. At each stop we were garlanded with marigolds and even more white scarves.