At first their relationship was uneasy: at best, joshing; at worst, strained. In time, as they got to know each other better and to recognise each other’s strengths, they became close comrades. When, five years later, on VE Day, 8 May 1945, they stood together on the balcony at Buckingham Palace, they did so as firm friends, conscious that each, in his own way, had played his part in the victory. Churchill’s task, no doubt, had been infinitely more complex, challenging, and significant, but the King’s contribution – as a sounding board, as a figurehead, as a focus for national unity – was also key.
It was George VI who first described the House of Windsor as ‘the family firm’. It helped that – while, yes, they lived in castles and palaces and were surrounded by flummery and flunkies – there were only four of them, and they seemed … well, almost ordinary. The King’s shyness, diffidence, and stammer served to underline his decency. The Queen’s charm was simply irresistible. She wasn’t slim and chic and brittle (as ‘Queen Wallis’ would have been): she was soft and round, regal yet real, classy but comfortable and comforting. And the two girls – moving slowly through adolescence but still, mostly, seen dressed in matching outfits – looked to be model daughters: quite unspoilt and thoroughly wholesome.
Lilibet and Margaret Rose lived through the war years at Windsor Castle. They arrived at the beginning of May 1940, as the Germans began their assault on Belgium and the Netherlands, and France prepared to fall, thinking they were to be there for a few days. They remained for five years. Where they were was an official secret. Press and public were simply informed that the royal children had been evacuated to ‘a house in the country’. Some in government – fearful that they might be captured by the Nazis and used as hostages – wanted them evacuated to Canada. Churchill was opposed to the idea. So was the King.
Crawfie painted a lurid picture of the Princesses’ arrival at the ancient castle ‘in the gathering twilight of that May evening’: ‘We were tired, and it was very gloomy. Pictures had been removed, and all the beautiful glass chandeliers had been taken down. The State Apartments were muffled in dust-sheets, the glass-fronted cupboards turned to the walls. About the stone passages the shadowy figures of servants and foremen loomed, attending to the black-out. I remember one old man remarking to me dryly: “By the time we’ve blacked out all the windows here, it’s morning again, miss.” The two little girls clung to me apprehensively. Alah, as always when she was bothered or anxious, was cross.’
The Queen’s recollection of her war years at Windsor is rather different from Crawfie’s. ‘Windsor Castle was a fortress,’ said Crawfie, ‘not a home.’ To the Queen it was a home, and still is, and a favourite home, too. It is frustrating to Her Majesty that, simply because Crawfie wrote a book, every account of her childhood is seen, in part, from her governess’s perspective. Emotionally, Lilibet was closer to Alah and to Bobo than to Crawfie. And, perhaps, closer still to Jane and Crackers and Carol and Susan and Ching – some of the dogs – and Jock and Hans, two of the ponies. If, today, you talk to the Queen about the war, she won’t mention Crawfie, but she will talk, happily, about her animals.
From 1938 she was taking formal riding lessons from the royal instructor, Horace Smith. She learnt to ride side-saddle. She was introduced to carriage driving. In 1943 and 1944, driving her own pony and cart, she won first prize in the Royal Windsor Horse Show. In 1942 the King took her up on to the Wiltshire Downs, to the Beckhampton Stables, to watch the royal racehorses being trained. She visited the royal stud at Hampton Court. She went to Newmarket to see more royal racehorses in training. In 1943, aged seventeen, she first rode to hounds. She still spent several hours each day closeted with Crawfie, conscientiously learning her lessons – and, twice a week, taking instruction on English history and the British constitution from Sir Henry Marten, who came up to the Castle in his dog-cart – but, undoubtedly, during these years, she was most alive, most at ease, most happy, with her dogs and her horses, the sustaining passions of her life.
These adolescent years were also the ones during which another, quite different, sustaining force took a lifelong hold on the young Princess. On 1 March 1942, when she was not quite sixteen, Lilibet was confirmed and took her first communion. Her father was Supreme Governor of the Church of England, but not just in name. In his most celebrated broadcast, at the beginning of the war, he had said, ‘I believe from my heart that the cause which binds together my peoples and our gallant and faithful Allies is the cause of Christian civilisation.’ His daughter believed it, too. At his Coronation – and hers – at the heart of the service, the sovereign is given a copy of the Holy Bible, with the words: ‘We present you with this Book, the most valuable thing that this world affords. Here is wisdom; this is the royal Law; these are the lively Oracles of God.’ The Queen, not as a matter of form, but as a matter of faith, says ‘Amen’ to that.
So, Lilibet was a teenage girl who played with her dogs, groomed her ponies, said her prayers, and lived in a castle. She had friends: cousins and the children of courtiers. She had dancing lessons on Saturday mornings with Miss Vacani, dancing mistress to the gentry.40 She continued with the Girl Guides and became leader of her patrol. For four consecutive Christmases she and Margaret Rose appeared in quite elaborate Christmas pantomimes, produced by a master from the local Church of England school and featuring neighbourhood children and young evacuees as well as the two Princesses. There was a war going on, and a golden childhood, too.
Margaret Rhodes was a year older than her cousin Lilibet. She explained to me, ‘I was at Windsor during the war, because I was doing a shorthand and typing course at Queen’s College, which had moved out to Egham. I lived at Windsor and went into Egham on the bus. And, later, I worked at MI6 and lived at Buckingham Palace. Queen Elizabeth’s great achievement during the war was that she kept family life going, kept it as normal as possible. When we were about sixteen or seventeen, she had little parties with the young Grenadier officers, so we could have a dance. And when the bombs were falling, she was always so calm. I remember there was a wonderful butler who would come in, bow, and say solemnly, “Purple warning, Your Majesty,” which meant that the Germans were closer than they ought to be. We had to go to the air-raid shelter, along miles of corridor. Queen Elizabeth would not be hurried. If people tried to hurry her, she simply slowed down.’
At Windsor, Lilibet and Margaret Rose believed they shared the privations of the people. Their food may have been served to them by the nursery footman, but they were told it was subject to the rationing restrictions that applied to the public at large. There were lone lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling in their chilly, draughty bedrooms. Fires were limited and hot water was restricted, with a black line painted around the royal bathtubs as a reminder that the water should not be more than five inches deep. The children were also expected to contribute to the war effort.
In October 1940, when Lilibet was fourteen and a half, she made her first broadcast, introducing a series of ‘Children in Wartime’ programmes for the BBC. ‘She was so good about the endless rehearsals we had to have to get the breathing and phrasing right,’ said Crawfie. Her voice was high-pitched, her accent high-falutin’, but her performance was flawless. John ‘Jock’ Colville, then twenty-five and assistant private secretary to the Prime Minister, and, much later, private secretary to Princess Elizabeth herself, listened and was ‘embarrassed by the sloppy sentiment’ of the broadcast, but, by every other account, the people – in Britain, in the Dominions, in America – loved it. The message was straightforward: ‘Thousands of you in this country have had to leave your homes and be separated from your father and mother. My sister Margaret Rose and I feel so much for you, as we know from experience what it means to be away from those we love most of all.’ According to Crawfie, ‘Lilibet herself put in several phrases that were quite her, and everyone who heard this particular speech will remember the most spontaneous and amusing end. Lilibet, always anxious to bring her small sister forward, said, “Come on
, Margaret, say good night,” and a small, clear voice piped in rather pompously, “Good night, children.”’
In fact, the end was not spontaneous. It was fully scripted and Margaret’s farewell line actually read: ‘Good night and good luck to you all.’ Nor did Lilibet need to do much to bring her small sister forward. Margaret was naturally precocious. She was always the livelier and naughtier of the pair. She appears to have been encouraged in this by Crawfie, who claimed, ‘Margaret and I were very given to practical jokes and we each egged the other on.’ The Heiress Presumptive did not approve. ‘Lilibet was always too serious-minded,’ said Crawfie. On one occasion Margaret and Crawfie wanted to ring the alarm bell on the Castle terrace to see if it would bring out the guard from all over the Castle. On another, they took one of the elderly gardener’s brooms from his wheelbarrow and hid it in the bushes. ‘Lilibet was always ashamed of us on these occasions,’ reported Crawfie, without any apparent sense of remorse, ‘and walked away from us rather pink in the face.’
Sarah Bradford, in her biography of George VI, quotes an unnamed courtier as saying of Margaret Rose, ‘She was a wicked little girl, there were moments when I’d have given anything to have given her the hell of a slap.’ These were moments that the general public were not privy to. ‘They spoiled her,’ said the courtier of Margaret’s parents. ‘They adored her; the King used to look at her as if he couldn’t believe anybody could be so much fun. But I think he fully realized that much as he admired Princess Margaret – he said something once that made it quite clear – he realized the Queen was the best of the two.’
Their cousin, Margaret Rhodes, said to me, ‘The Queen and Princess Margaret were such different people. Occasionally, she was driven mad by her, but they were sisters.’ From an early age, Margaret was spoilt, outspoken, playful, and flirtatious. Lilibet was not. During the war years at Windsor, young Grenadier Guards officers would sometimes join the girls and their governesses for lunch or tea. Margaret would chatter away gaily. Lilibet was more restrained, more formal, more dignified. Cosmo Lang, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who conducted her confirmation, spent some time alone with her and concluded that ‘though naturally not very communicative, she showed real intelligence and understanding’. Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of the American President, came to tea and reported that the Princess was ‘quite serious and with a great deal of character and personality. She asked me a number of questions about life in the United States and they were serious questions.’
Lilibet was a serious young woman. She listened to the BBC news bulletins with care. She charted the progress of the war with her own large wall map with little flags that were moved from place to place. Under the instruction of Sir Henry Marten, she was taken through the niceties of The English Constitution by Walter Bagehot (1826–77), required reading for monarchs in the making. She was being prepared – and preparing herself – to fulfil her destiny.
To mark her sixteenth birthday, in 1942, she was made Colonel of the Grenadier Guards, in place of her great-great-uncle and godfather, the Duke of Connaught, who had died recently, aged ninety-one. ‘It was a bit frightening inspecting a regiment for the first time,’ she reported to a friend, ‘but it was not as bad as I expected it to be.’ She had her father at her side, and, in truth, all that was required of her was to stand stock still while the troops marched to and fro. More of an ordeal for her would have been the small talk she had to make afterwards, mingling with the officers and men, and the photographers she had to face. Ten press cameramen were admitted to the event and the unofficial court photographer, Cecil Beaton, was invited to take a special birthday portrait. It is a fabulous shot, both sexy and innocent: the sixteen-year-old Princess, looking straight into the camera, is not quite smiling. She is in uniform, but her jacket is unbuttoned and her hat is at an angle that is almost provocative. The picture was reproduced around the world. A life of being photographed had begun.
Today the Queen is not comfortable with the idea of ‘image making’. She is wary of being involved in what we now call ‘spin’. In fact, whether consciously or not, seventy years ago George VI and his private secretary, Alexander Hardinge, allowed carefully wrought images of the young Princess to be used as visual propaganda for both the war effort and the House of Windsor. Different kinds of image were required to tell different aspects of the story. Cecil Beaton – whose brilliantly lit and composed pictures (often with painted backdrops) had helped transform the bosomy, somewhat cosy and domestic Duchess of York into a fully-fledged Queen – was used to give the world a romantic Princess Elizabeth. (His eighteenth-birthday portrait has her set against an idealised skating scene, eyes wistfully cast down.) Another photographer, Lisa Sheridan, was brought on board to produce more of a home-and-hearth series of pictures of Lilibet and Margaret Rose: nice girls, in sensible clothes, with perfect manners and adorable pets, the princesses-in-the-castle-next-door. When, in February 1945, Lilibet joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service as No. 230973 Second Subaltern Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor, ‘aged 18, eyes blue, hair brown, height 5ft 3in’, she was photographed, on her knees, spanner in hand, on the ATS car mechanics’ course at Aldershot, learning how to change a wheel.
Nearly sixty years later, in October 2003, at the opening of an exhibition at the Imperial War Museum, the Queen was reunited with six of her wartime ATS colleagues. Betty Royle, aged eighty-two, said, ‘I think she has never quite forgotten us, because those were the days when she had a kind of freedom.’ Pat Blake, eighty-two, who had been an ATS sergeant, said, ‘You’ve got to remember that in those days people knew little about royalty. There was no telly. Once in a while you saw them on a newsreel in a local cinema. She really did seem a remote person to us all … She and her sister seemed like fairy-tale people. The fact that we were going to work alongside her doing night driving, learning first aid, military law and theory and practice of mechanics was quite spellbinding … She seemed very, very young – but she was very easy and just very unaffected and pleasant.’
In theory, on the course young Princess Elizabeth was ‘to be treated in exactly the same way as any other officer learning at the driving training centre’. Well, she was – and she wasn’t. She was taught alongside the others (who were instructed to call her ‘Your Royal Highness’ and then ‘Ma’am to rhyme with jam’) and barked at when they were barked at, but, in class, she sat in the centre of the front row, and at night, when the rest of the girls kipped down in the dormitory, she was driven back to Windsor Castle. Her ‘normal’ life was anything but normal. For her wardrobe she was dependent on clothing coupons like everybody else, but, somehow, the royal household was issued with more coupons than everybody else. The world was told she received just five shillings a week in pocket money and more than half of that the kind Princess donated to good causes. It was true, and it was good of her, but, of course, to her, money had no real meaning. She wanted for nothing. Her life was never – would never be, could never be – ‘real’.
But the war was real enough. In August 1942 it claimed the life of her uncle, the Duke of Kent, killed on board an RAF Sunderland flying boat bound for Iceland, where he was due to inspect RAF installations. In atrocious weather the craft flew into the side of a Scottish hill. The King was devastated. It was a family tragedy: the Duchess of Kent was a widow at thirty-five, with three small children, the youngest of whom, Prince Michael of Kent, was only seven weeks old. The Duke’s nieces shared in the family sadness. ‘It was the second uncle they had lost completely,’ Crawfie observed, ‘for though the first, Uncle David, was not dead, they did not see him any more. The Royal conspiracy of silence had closed about him, as it did about so many other uncomfortable things. In the Palace and the Castle his name was never mentioned.’
Lilibet’s adolescence coincided with the Second World War. She was a child of thirteen at the outset in September 1939, a woman of nineteen when victory came in the summer of 1945. In the intervening six years, she grew up: she was confirmed; she made her first br
oadcast; she shot her first stag; she inspected her first regiment; she launched her first ship; she learnt to drive; in her ATS training she tested herself, for the first time (perhaps for the only time), against contemporaries from ordinary backgrounds; indeed she mixed, after a fashion, with ordinary people for the first time; she rode her horses; she loved her dogs; she learnt to dance; she became a Counsellor of State and, in her father’s absence, visiting the Eighth Army in Italy in 1944, she performed her first constitutional functions, signifying the Royal Assent to Acts of Parliament. ‘There was always a strong sense of duty mixed with joie de vivre in her character,’ according to her tutor in French, the Vicomtesse de Bellaigue. Princess Elizabeth had a good war, and she remembers it as, essentially, a happy time in her life.
She is not alone, of course. A number of her contemporaries, and those just a little older than her, still speak of the war as the happiest time of their life. In a conversation about what brings happiness to people’s lives – of which more later – I asked the late eminent Irish psychiatrist Professor Anthony Clare why that might be. ‘Among those who fought in the Second World War there was a comradeship,’ he told me. ‘People who might otherwise have found it difficult to socialise were thrown in together. They had no choice. And there was a shared philosophy, a common purpose. The basic fighting man felt he was doing something worthwhile. That was why the 1939–45 war was so different from Vietnam, or even the Gulf wars. And those engaged in the war were testing themselves. That seems to be rather important. Happy people are rarely sitting around. They are usually involved in some ongoing interchange with life. Of course, we’re talking about people who survived the war, not those who were wounded or killed. And I’m not sure how many back home felt that way, other than those in the blitzed cities where, again, there was this comradeship.’
Philip: The Final Portrait Page 16
