A myth, largely media inspired, has grown that she was over-fond of drink. It was, I suppose, an almost affectionate canard, and as far as the press was concerned fitted in with the image that she was a good old girl and a sport. All I can say is that her having a drinking habit was simply unimaginable. Her alcohol intake never varied. Before lunch she would have a gin and Dubonnet, with a slice of lemon and a lot of ice. During the meal she might take some wine. In the evening she would have a dry Martini and a glass of champagne with her dinner. There was no excess. In the evenings when we dined alone she liked to watch television as we ate and she thoroughly enjoyed cookery programmes, particularly ‘Two Fat Ladies’, and comedy shows like ‘Dad’s Army’. She was amazingly well informed on so many subjects, from gardening, fishing, and racing, to history and European affairs, and even Persian poetry. She was eclectic and would soak up ideas from her wide ranging circle of friends and guests; actors, artists, musicians and poets. She befriended the mystical poet, Edith Sitwell, who, when she was mourning King George VI, sent her a book of poems which comforted her and, she said, made her realise what a selfish thing grief can be.
Another favoured guest was the Poet Laureate, Ted Hughes. One would not have thought that Mr Hughes would have fitted comfortably into what was basically a traditionalist milieu, but Queen Elizabeth was full of surprises and of catholic taste. He wrote an admiring poem about her on her ninety-fifth birthday comparing her to a six-rooted tree. I’ve never quite been able to work that one out, but it must have been acceptable because in 1998, shortly before he died, he was appointed to the Order of Merit. She would have been pleased when, twelve years after his death he was given a permanent memorial, in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, alongside the great names of British literature, from Chaucer, Shakespeare and Keats, to TS Eliot and WH Auden.
That year, my seventh ‘in-waiting’, did not begin well for my aunt. In January, while visiting the horses in the Sandringham stable yard, she slipped, fell and broke her left hip. I was in the drawing room when she was brought in. She must have been in great pain, but was stoically silent sitting very upright on a chair until the local doctor Ian Campbell arrived. He confirmed that she had broken her hip and an ambulance arrived very quickly. I went with her to the hospital at Kings Lynn, and I remember that she gave me her pearls, brooches and earrings to look after before she was wheeled away for investigation. When I returned to Sandringham there was a lot of discussion about the best course of action. Should she go immediately to London where her own doctors were or be treated by the Norfolk doctors? I thought that the three-hour journey to town would be nightmarish in her condition, but it was at length decided that that was the best option for her and I’m sure that she was given a shot of a strong pain killer. The operation took place that evening and later she returned to Clarence House with a new hip to convalesce.
As her tenth decade progressed her family became increasingly worried about the infirmities associated with her great age, and particularly the risk of falling. The Queen sent her a special walking stick, asking her to at least try it, saying that it would make the ‘two Margarets’ – that is Princess Margaret and myself, Jean, my sister, and not least herself ‘very happy and relieved’ if she would use it. She did, but under protest. I recall watching her, after one engagement, tossing it with a gesture of contempt into the back of her car. The royal round continued, as did my stints ‘in-waiting’. They gave a recurring tempo to my life, broken by my much-anticipated visits to Scotland. Of all the royal homes, Birkhall, on the edge of the Balmoral estate, was the one I most deeply loved. I had been going there since I was five years old. Before Queen Elizabeth enlarged it, Birkhall was little more than a small eighteenth- century dower house. There were few rooms for visitors; the nursery and the sparse accommodation was filled whenever Queen Elizabeth held open house. There was one large room in the tin-roofed annexe, where as a child I played with Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret.
The burn, the Muick, burbled away at the bottom of the steeply sloping garden and behind rose the fir clad heights of the Coils of Muick. In October the birches turned bright yellow and the rowans scarlet and one could hear the stags roaring their autumnal defiance. At Birkhall lunch was never indoors, whatever the weather, except on Sunday, which had to be observed with some degree of formality, after attending the Kirk. Queen Elizabeth’s friends and relations all contributed to the cost of building a charming little wooden cabin beside one of her favourite pools in the River Dee. She called it the ‘Old Bull and Bush’ after a pub near Hampstead Heath, immortalised in the music hall song ‘Down at the Old Bull and Bush’ performed by Florrie Forde in the 1920s, when Queen Elizabeth was a girl. She loved the old songs and knew all the words. In another life she might have been a star of the ‘Halls’. Dinner at Birkhall could be an uproarious affair. At the end of the meal Queen Elizabeth would start a series of toasts. As well as ‘Hooray for . . .’ with glasses held high, there was even more of ‘Down with . . .’ with glasses almost disappearing beneath the table. The toasts, combined with the simultaneous chiming of six grandfather clocks, and the community singing — ‘Lloyd George knew my Father’ was a firm favourite — made for an unforgettable evening. So being ‘in-waiting’ was not all protocol and curtseying: it was, in fact, tremendous fun.
CHAPTER NINE
Afterwards
I greatly enjoyed my eleven years ‘in-waiting’ and the memories are always with me. There are so many happy recollections and the faces of the people I met sometimes pass by in a cavalcade. There were people like Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama, who was bursting with smiles, and so overjoyed and full of emotion at meeting Queen Elizabeth that he virtually prostrated himself before her. I seem to remember that he set off his traditional dress with a very smart pair of Bond Street shoes. I like to reflect on the past. It’s so much better than watching television.
Clarence House, where I spent so much of my time as a member of the Royal Household, is now the residence of the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall when they are in London. He kindly gave a small party for all of us in Queen Elizabeth’s Household soon after he took it over — a sort of private view with drinks — and I was delighted to see how beautifully he had restored it. The alterations are designed to reflect the change of occupancy and the colour schemes have been adjusted, but the decoration of the rooms retains the ambience created by Queen Elizabeth and much of her collection of works of art and furniture remain in the places she originally chose for them. However, if only walls could speak!
Birkhall gives the Prince and Duchess a measure of insulation from the pressure of their official lives, but when I was last there I got quite a jolt when I saw Queen Elizabeth’s blue raincoats still hanging in the hall, and this prompted a flood of memories about our windy walks and rain-swept picnics. I particularly remember when we met a group of hikers on their way to the Dubh Loch. Queen Elizabeth had a long conversation with them and up to her death she received an annual Christmas card from ‘the hikers of the Dubh Loch’. On another occasion she shared our picnic with some walkers. And what has happened to the ‘Old Bull and Bush’?
After Queen Elizabeth died my life changed radically. I was eighty-one, soon to be eighty-two and my social life became minimal, although I have regular stays with my cousin the Queen at Balmoral and Sandringham, which, as always, are hugely enjoyable. I know every inch of Balmoral but I am less familiar with Sandringham, which is seductive in an entirely different way. There is not so much as a hill in sight, and Noel Coward was right when he wrote in ‘Private Lives’, ‘very flat, Norfolk’. But you get the huge clouds of the wonderful East Anglian skies and can taste the salt on the wind blowing off the coast which is very close by. I allow myself to be spoilt at Sandringham. I have breakfast in bed, and don’t get up before ten in the morning. I read the newspapers and go for long walks: it is all very undemanding. The Queen still rides, sans hard hat, but I don’t, and fishing and shooting have now bec
ome spectator sports for me.
At home the Queen drops in on me sometimes on Sunday after Matins in our little chapel, and we exchange the latest news. I’m still active. No one has taken my driving licence away; woe betide them if they try, and I still sometimes do the run to Scotland by car. I do rather a lot of gardening; chugging round the lawns on my tractor-mower and keeping the weeds at bay. My front garden overlooks the Smith’s Lawn polo ground and white polo balls have a habit of finding their way into the flower beds.
I go for a walk every day with my West Highland terrier. She is a darling, who has no sense of obedience, never coming when she is called. I had never had a terrier before and have been told that they have a mindset uniquely their own, especially when it comes to chasing rabbits, grey squirrels and pheasants. Living in Windsor Great Park feels like living in proper country, although something of a manicured version. I expected something different when the Queen asked me, with a touch of humour, whether I, a country woman through and through, could tolerate living in ‘suburbia’. And, of course, I wouldn’t be here but for an accident of birth: that my mother’s youngest sister married the Duke of York, later King George VI — and through the kindness of their elder daughter, our Queen.
I have kept the letter that my aunt wrote to my mother after the Duke of York, with his sister, Princess Mary, visited Glamis in the late summer of 1920 and took the first tentative steps towards his courtship of the then Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon. The future Queen Elizabeth, who, at the time had no idea that she was an object of interest to the twenty-four-year-old Duke, told my mother: ‘The Duke of York was very pleasant, and has improved immensely in every way. James [Major James Stuart, later Viscount Stuart of Findhorn, and the Duke’s Equerry] has worked wonders . . . I showed the Duke and Princess Mary round the castle; they are really babies and played ridiculous games of hide and seek . . . but I must say that the Duke was very nice, tho’ royalty staying is a nuisance.’ The Duke was a rather shy, sensitive young man, plagued by a severe stammer, but he had a streak of pure grit and a not to be beaten attitude to life. It took him almost three years of determined courtship to persuade my aunt to marry him. How fortunate for me – and for him – that she did!
Most people would say, and I entirely agree with them, that I have been extraordinarily lucky in my life. I had thirty-one years of extremely happy marriage; four children to be proud of; seven grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. I have travelled widely and enjoyed the surge of adrenalin in moments of danger. I have been entranced by the dry brown beauty of Africa as well as the blue mistiness of Scotland’s Western Isles. I have heard the ugly squabbling laughter of hyenas, as well as the magnificent roaring of Highland stags. I have seen the shimmering beauty of the Taj Mahal and the rawness of a yak herdsman’s shelter in the Himalayas.
There are a million things I still want to do and places I long to see, but meanwhile I am a happy and contented person. The children gather round at Christmas, filling my spare beds, with mattresses for my grandchildren. It’s chaotic but great fun. My eldest son, Simon, has to my pride and joy become a member of the Royal Company of Archers, of which his Elphinstone grandfather was Captain General. When he was at Harrow he was a Page of Honour to the Queen, having to turn out, dressed in a knee-length scarlet coat, a white lace jabot and waistcoat, white breeches, white stockings, black buckled shoes and a small sword. He looked as if he had stepped out of an eighteenth-century painting. His most important duty was to hold up, with his three fellow Pages, the Queen’s train at the State Opening of Parliament. The long heavy train of the Robe of State needs four pairs of hands, and if it were not carried, the Queen would not be able to move forwards.
Simon was paid £200 a year for this and other ceremonial duties, like the service for the Order of the Garter at Windsor, where the train only needed two pairs of hands. More importantly, as far as he was concerned, was the bonus of getting out of school. He has had his share of adventure. After Harrow we were steering him towards the army or a job in the City, but neither prospect appealed to him and he took off for Africa where his cousin, Robin Plunket, the 8th Lord, had an estate near the Zimbabwe–Mozambique border. It was 1977 and as he made his way out, thousands of expats were heading the other way. I believe it was called the ‘chicken run’. He joined the British South African Police. He had, however, no qualms about independence or the inevitability of black rule.
Mugabe was espousing Marxist theory, but not really putting it into practice and so Simon stayed on and later tried his hand at managing a tobacco farm. Denys told everyone that he had become a tobacconist. Then he changed tack and spent four years as a chemical salesman; switching course yet again and going into tourism with Abercrombie & Kent, offering bespoke holidays to wealthy types who wanted to experience the real Africa. But Zimbabwe’s internal strife knocked the stuffing out of the holiday trade, and Zimbabwe was lurching towards crisis as Mugabe started his campaign of threats towards white farmers. Things went from bad to worse, and Simon, having been swept up by accident in a Movement for Democratic Change march in Harare, was picked up by the police, badly beaten and charged with incitement to riot. He talked himself out of it and was released, but the experience left him shaken. I was horrified, and told the Queen, who was concerned. And so eventually and reluctantly he returned to Scotland, with his wife Susie, and their two daughters. They were invited to Balmoral by Queen Elizabeth and have now settled in Scotland for good. Simon is now a property developer, based in Perth.
My eldest child, Annabel, emigrated to Australia with her first husband and farmed with him in New South Wales. They divorced and she returned home with her baby son. She worked as a secretary in St George’s House, Windsor, the residential conference centre close to the castle, in which Prince Philip takes a keen interest, until her remarriage, in 1986, to Charles Cope. They now live in Bideford in Devon, the county in which Denys and I lived so happily for many years.
Victoria, my younger daughter, was child-orientated from an early age and did a course of Montessori teaching, subsequently working in a Montessori school in London. She married a very distant cousin from New Zealand — sharing a common great-grandfather — called Nick Deans who was a sculptor. Soon afterwards Nick had to have a kidney transplant, gallantly donated by his mother. It worked and he was well and healthy for sixteen years, when his kidney failed again. A second implant was unsuccessful and Nick sadly died. Sometime afterwards Victoria married John Pryor and together they now run a rather chic delicatessen at Cley on the north Norfolk coast.
Michael, my youngest child, like Simon went to Harrow, and like me, and his Elphinstone grandfather, has itchy feet, travelling extensively. He read law at West of England University in Bristol, but his gardening genes, probably inherited from my mother, took over, and quite simply he is very happy earning his living by looking after people’s gardens. He too lives in Norfolk.
Among my grandchildren I have an artist, a writer, a practitioner of Japanese medical science and a photographer. I also have three great-grandchildren. Life is never dull, but when they were growing up I kept on pushing the idea that they should acquire some practical skills, so as to have something to fall back on, like plumbing. Plumbers, I protested, were always in demand.
Queen Elizabeth would sometimes remark that my attendance at church was tardy — she never missed — but I actually have a firm faith, and am convinced that I shall be reunited with Denys. My belief in the afterlife has been confirmed by the experience of my daughter Victoria who, after Nick died, felt compelled one day to visit the woman doctor who treated him in hospital. The doctor told my daughter about an extraordinary dream she had had the night before, in which a youthful and fit Nick appeared, telling her: ‘Look, I know that Vic is taking it very badly, but you must tell her that all is well with me, and not to be sad.’ Perhaps it is my Strathmore heritage but that story confirmed my own belief in something better ‘upstairs’ as Queen Elizabeth described the exit lounge of mortality.<
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I have now been to the funerals of all my brothers and sisters. It makes me feel rather like a species of dinosaur left behind by evolution. There are no close Elphinstone family members of my generation left to ask: ‘Do you remember?’ or ‘What happened then?’ On the other hand there is a great sense of relief that I can be just myself; get up when I like; go to bed when I like and have my meals when I like. I no longer really mind what other people think, and so there is much to be said for antediluvian freedom.
My eldest brother, John, the 17th Lord Elphinstone, died in 1975. My younger brother, Andrew, predeceased him that same year, and so Andrew’s son James became the 18th Lord Elphinstone. Sadly he died young and the present Lord Elphinstone is his eldest son, Alexander. My eldest sister, Elizabeth, died in 1980, on the very day that the ‘Old Bull and Bush’ was presented to Queen Elizabeth as a birthday present. It was an awful shock. My sister had been a bridesmaid at my aunt’s wedding to the Duke of York, and they had always been close. Only eleven years separated them, and they were more like sisters than aunt and niece. However, the inauguration of the ‘Old Bull and Bush’ had to go ahead, as Queen Elizabeth did not want to disappoint the many friends who had travelled to Scotland for the occasion. My sister Elizabeth’s death cast a shadow over an otherwise lovely day, but she was well remembered during the long and lively lunch presided over by her aunt. Elizabeth was fourteen years older than me; very kind and loving. She was keen on ornithology and we would spend long, cold hours, scanning the beaches of Aberlady, trying to identify ducks and waders. She was also keen on God and when she was in an evangelising mood would lure me into her bedroom to pray. She was dismayed that I did not take this seriously enough. I found it positively embarrassing to kneel down, in cold blood so to speak, and try to talk to my maker.
The Final Curtsey Page 13
