Daughter of Empire (25 page)

We flew through the night, stopping only to refuel in Libya. Thankfully Bobo had sent a message to her deputy on board SS
Gothic
and she had delivered a black coat, handbag and shoes to
the Argonaut so that the Queen could arrive in England in mourning. She could not find a suitable hat, however, so a telegram was sent asking for one to be delivered when the plane arrived. It was
late afternoon the next day when we started our descent over London, and we could soon see that a large official reception had gathered to welcome the new Queen home. As we waited to disembark, I
could see the prime minister, Winston Churchill, standing next to the Leader of the Opposition, Clement Attlee, the Duke of Gloucester and, to my delight, my parents. The Queen peered over my
shoulder, looking for her private car but seeing only the huge black royal limousines that were drawn up in morbid ranks. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘they have sent the hearse.’ And as
she said this, softly and slowly, I was suddenly conscious that the private life of this twenty-five-year-old woman and that of her young husband – who would have to abandon his naval career
– and those of their two small children, had come to an abrupt end. From now on, they would forever be in the public eye.

The Queen left the plane first and Prince Philip followed, leaving a little gap so that the photographers could capture her alone. I was so relieved to see my parents, and in the privacy of our
car, I conveyed my shock and the distress of the last few hours. Like me, they had thought that the King was getting better. We talked about the Queen Mother, who at fifty-one was now a widow, and
within the space of a single day had been removed from centre stage.

The King’s body was lying in state at Westminster Hall and I went with my parents to pay our last respects. My father had admired the King and his sense of duty, believing him to be a
shrewd man who was more aware of public opinion than his ministers. Unlike his elder brother, my father said, he had always striven to keep his finger on the public pulse. The King was buried at St
George’s Chapel, Windsor, and as I looked at the three generations of queens in their black veils – Mary, the Queen Mother and Elizabeth II standing together – I thought of how
terrible their grief, so well hidden, must be.

I stayed on at Buckingham Palace for a couple of weeks to help with the thousands of letters and telegrams of condolence that the Queen was receiving each and every day. Most were written, not
to a remote ‘celebrity’, but to a real person who happened to be their Queen, the head of a royal family that meant a great deal to them. Some came from women who had recently lost a
parent and wanted to empathise with her situation. Many of the stories we read were deeply moving and they showed how widely the late King had been revered. These letters were a source of great
comfort to the Queen.

Not all of the authors of these letters were quite so balanced, and among the piles organised under the collective headings of ‘children’, ‘women’ and ‘service
families’, we also had ‘lunatics’. We spent hours opening, reading, sorting and replying to them all. One afternoon six of us were sitting in a circle on the floor going through
the post when I opened a telegram that was signed ‘Mama in Chicago’. ‘Oh, listen to this!’ I cried, delighted at a diversion from our sad task. ‘One for the lunatic
pile!’ Unbeknown to me, the Queen had just entered the room and my laughter was met by stony silence. ‘Pammy,’ she said, ‘Ma
ma
is in Chicago just now . . .’ As
she removed the telegram from my hand I remembered, to my horror, that Aunt Alice, Prince Philip’s mother, was indeed in Chicago, raising money for her religious order. We continued our work
in silence.

I had only been asked to be a lady-in-waiting for the Commonwealth Tour, which had now been postponed, so I went to Malta to join my parents. My father was now commander-in-chief of the
Mediterranean Fleet, a job he had very much desired. The proprietor of the
Daily Express
, Lord Beaverbrook, however, was still running his campaign to turn the public against my father. This
vendetta had started when the film
In Which We Serve
opened with a shot of the
Daily Express
floating in the water, boasting the headline ‘There will be no War’. It was
dated 1 September 1939, two days before the declaration of war. Beaverbrook had been a great champion of my father when he was made the young Chief of Combined Operations, but when my father
asserted his independence from ‘The Beaver’ this was not forgiven. There may also have been another reason why Beaverbrook pursued this vendetta. In the 1930s Max’s mistress, Jean
Norton, was my mother’s best friend. Jeanie and my father liked to go riding – she was an excellent horsewoman and he thought she had the perfect figure for a woman on a horse. But
while they enjoyed riding together they were never lovers, as Max possibly suspected. When the
Daily Mirror
columnist Bill Connor, aka ‘Cassandra’, arrived in Malta, he told my
father over lunch that Lord Beaverbrook had sent him out to ‘report on the riots’. ‘But there are no riots in Malta,’ Bill had replied. ‘Then start some,’ Lord
Beaverbrook had roared. At the beginning of the Second World War Cassandra had to cease his famous column because of paper shortages. When peace was declared it started again with the words
‘As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted . . .’

We now lived in Admiralty House in Valletta. In the entrance hall the soaring staircase rose between great marble plaques that listed all the naval commanders-in-chief since Nelson. The garden
overlooked the ramparts and could be reached only through a tunnel beneath the street and a climb up a steep staircase. When the fleet was berthed in Malta my father worked in an office overlooking
Grand Harbour.

When Aunt Louise and Uncle Gustav of Sweden came to visit us, it was touching to see my father reminisce with his sister about their time spent on the island as children. While returning from a
day out visiting their old haunts, however, driving along the Sliema harbour front, my father – a notoriously bad driver – managed to overturn the car, much to the horror of my mother,
Uncle Gustav and me, who were in the car behind. Fortunately Aunt Louise and my father scrambled out unhurt, but the car lay rather helplessly upside down by the side of the road. As torrid
newspaper headlines ran through our minds, a troop of Royal Marines came into view. Seeing his commander-in-chief standing at the roadside, their commanding officer brought them smartly to a halt
and saluted. ‘Ah, Captain Huntingford,’ said my father, ‘oblige me by righting my car.’ And with a heave-ho, the Royal Marines obliged him and we were soon back on the
road.

Ever more adventurous and keen to see different parts of the world, I went to stay with George Arida – a dashing young Lebanese man whom I had first met during our previous time in Malta
–
and his family in their apartment in Beirut as well as their little house in the mountains, ‘The Cedars’. It was very beautiful up there with astonishing vistas, and
surrounded by the cedars from which, it was said, King Solomon had built his temple. We spent our days waterskiing and our evenings socialising with the Paris-chic Lebanese women and their
husbands, including George’s attractive sister Jacqueline, who was married to the son of the president of Lebanon. These were heady days and it wasn’t long before George and I fell for
each other. I had had a couple of romances previously but had never really been in love. George was shy and quiet but a romantic, sweet-natured man, and if circumstances had been different, we
would have been inseparable. We always found our partings distressing and were consoled only by the constant stream of love letters that followed.

Such was the depth of my feelings for George and our desire to see each other as often as we could that I chose to follow my heart and not accompany my mother on a trip to Delhi to see Panditji.
He teased me in a subsequent letter: ‘It’s been a joy to have your mother here, when you have deserted us and not come this way.’ But I could tell he was pleased that I was happy
and I knew that I would be seeing him later that year for, some sixteen months after the death of King George VI, the Queen’s coronation was due to take place. While the Queen had indeed been
declared Sovereign the moment her father had died on 6 February 1952, it had taken sixteen months to organise the coronation. As tradition declared that the monarch has to be crowned in sight of
‘all of the people’, a great many heads of state from all over the world had been invited to attend. Of course, this had a knock-on effect as the seating capacity inside Westminster
Abbey had to be pretty much expanded threefold to accommodate the eight thousand or so guests. There had been some concern that the death of the Queen’s grandmother on 24 April, just a few
weeks before the coronation, would mean that it would have to be postponed, but Queen Mary had thoughtfully made known her desire that no one must be in mourning during the coronation.

And so, on 2 June 1953, the world witnessed the most public of coronations. To begin with, it was the first time that television cameras had been allowed inside Westminster Abbey and it was also
the first time that a great event had been broadcast live throughout the nation. An estimated forty million people across the world would be able to watch it on television in addition to another
eleven million who would listen in on the wireless. As such there were many rehearsals before the great day, the Duchess of Norfolk deputising for the Queen, though Queen Elizabeth did have to
practise wearing the crown the day before as the St Stephen’s Crown weighed a colossal seven pounds. Anne Glenconner later told me that she and the other maids of honour had to keep putting
the brakes on when they walked behind the Queen carrying her train to avoid running into each other, as everything was so much slower than they had rehearsed it.

The more than eight thousand guests in attendance included royalty and dignitaries from all over the world. Every crowned head was given a carriage in which to arrive at the abbey, and as there
were so many people to get in, several peers processed to their seats with sandwiches concealed beneath their coronets. My mother, Patricia, John and I had been instructed by the Lord Chamberlain
to arrive only an hour before the ceremony began so we did not have too long to wait. My father had a rather unsettling ride behind the coronation coach, on a horse that was so fresh it pranced
around and would not keep to a dignified walk. When he dismounted at the abbey and the Life Guard trooper approached to take the reins, my father told him, somewhat tetchily – and
unrealistically – to take the horse away and exercise it.

The Queen was dressed in a white satin gown designed for her by Norman Hartnell. The full skirt was embroidered with beaded emblems of the United Kingdom and all the Commonwealth countries,
including a rose, a thistle, a shamrock, a maple leaf, a fern and the lotus flower of India picked out in diamante and seed pearls. This dress had taken over three thousand hours of handiwork to
complete. As she processed into the abbey, her long crimson velvet train was borne by her six maids of honour, their stunning dresses completing the tableau. The whole effect was magical.

I knew that, for the Queen, the coronation ceremony meant a great deal, particularly the anointing, for which she had requested the cameras be turned off. This was the most moving part of the
rite, and when it came, the maids of honour stepped forward to take her velvet robes and jewellery. When they then covered her coronation dress with the simple white linen overdress, I was struck
by how young, vulnerable and alone the Queen appeared. There was a hushed stillness, a sense of gravity and occasion, as the Archbishop of Canterbury anointed her hands, her head and her heart with
the consecrated oil that symbolised her divine right to rule. And while she may have looked fragile, the certainty in her voice as she said her vows was inspiring. During the investiture, the Lord
Chamberlain presented her with golden spurs, the symbol of chivalry, after which the archbishop offered a jewelled sword and armills, golden bracelets denoting sincerity and wisdom. Then the
Imperial Mantle, the gold royal robe that had been used by her father in his coronation, was placed over the white linen robe and she received the orb, the coronation ring, the glove and the
sceptre. As the new Queen was crowned, the abbey resounded with the dramatic and thunderous acclamations of ‘Long Live the Queen!’ and ‘God Save the Queen!’

Prince Philip was the first to do obeisance to her, bowing and kissing her cheek. His mother, Aunt Alice, led the royal family’s procession out of the abbey towards the West Door amid the
glorious music that echoed round the nave. I was so used to seeing her dressed in a workaday grey jacket and skirt and short nun’s veil – she had founded a nursing order of Greek
Orthodox nuns in 1949, modelled on the convent set up by my Great Aunt Ella, Grand Duchess Elizabeth of Russia – that it was a surprise to see her looking so dignified and regal in her finely
woven floor-length woollen cloak and flowing veil.

During the procession back to Buckingham Palace, the Queen wore the newly made velvet Purple Robe of State, edged with ermine and embroidered around the border in gold, the work of twelve
seamstresses from the Royal School of Needlework. The route to the palace had been designed so that as many people as possible could see the Queen, and because of the large number of people taking
part – just under thirty thousand officers, not to mention the vast number of royals from all over the world – it was three kilometres long and took two hours to complete. The Queen of
Tonga won the hearts of the public by not putting up the cover over her carriage, despite the rain. But what sent the press into overdrive was Princess Margaret’s gesture of brushing a piece
of lint from the jacket of Captain Peter Townsend, the late Queen’s equerry and a divorced man.

Following the procession, the Queen came out on to the balcony of the palace to wave to the crowds and watch the fly-past. In the evening, as ‘the lights of London’ came on all the
way down the Mall, to the National Gallery and down to the Tower of London, we watched the firework display with Panditji. He took a seat next to my mother, with my father on the other side, and I
sat behind them. It soon became clear that the people sitting next to me did not realise my connection, for a woman behind me exclaimed to her neighbour, ‘Golly, look – there is Lady
Mountbatten. And that’s the Indian Nehru next to her. How
can
she let him sit so near?’ At that moment, Nehru, in the familiar way he had with everyone, put his hand on my
mother’s arm to point something out. The effect on the couple behind me was immediate: ‘Look, he is touching her. How
can
she let him? It’s disgusting.’ Hearing this
sent a shiver down my spine.