Diana's Nightmare - The Family (30 page)

'But time and tide have drained the substance away from the symbol. So you have a symbol without substance.

'We are seeking to replace that symbol with one that is appropriate to Australia's needs and aspirations - an Australian Head of State in the form of a non-executive, largely ceremonial President.'

The model was Ireland's Mary Robinson rather than the expensively coiffed incumbent of the White House.

CONSIDERING the drama surrounding her, it was little wonder that nothing amused Her Majesty so much as playing a role other than her own. She had played The Monarch so often that she was not just synonymous with the role, she
was
the role. This could be tedious.

Her alternative repertoire dated from Christmas pantomimes at Windsor Castle. At seventeen, the Princess, dressed in kimono and white silk pantaloons, had played Aladdin. She burst out of a laundry basket in front of her special guest, an admiring Prince Philip. As she tap- danced and sang, Philip applauded wildly. Margaret might be the Family's most enduring actress, but she did not have the stage to herself. Christmas games of charades at Sandringham could be fiercely competitive if the sisters were on opposing sides.

One impromptu performance, however, caused some consternation among officers of the Royal Yacht
Britannia.
As the 'royal-palace-at-sea' cruised at twenty knots, the Queen turned up unexpectedly on the bridge. Among her various titles was Lord High Admiral of the United Kingdom, a position she treated with the utmost respect. But inexplicably she affected the mannerisms of a West Country yokel. A rolling gait and a suitably bucolic expression made the performance even more realistic. The only missing prop was a piece of straw between her teeth. Mystified though the officers of the watch were, Her Majesty kept up the pretence for some minutes, 'I'm told she was very convincing,' said a naval source. 'The captain, Rear Admiral Paul Greening, played it absolutely straight. He called her Ma'am and ignored the fact that she was addressing him in this peculiar voice.'

Her Majesty can also be quite idiosyncratic in her choice of the people she asks to meet outside the scope of her official duties. Sometimes the most unlikely players in show business attract her interest. The pop duo Wham!, who rated as the sexiest male performers of the Eighties, were astonished when they received a royal summons. 'I got a message saying simply that the Queen wanted to meet George Michael and Andrew Ridgely,' said Bryan Morrison, the pop music magnate who later founded the Royal County of Berkshire Polo Club. 'So I immediately drove them to meet her. She was at the Guards Polo Club in Windsor Great Park. I introduced them and they chatted to the Queen for quite a while - it was all very informal.'

Another quirk is that, when she dines at the homes of friends, she insists on eating from her own plates and with her own knives and forks. Prior to her arrival at the Chelsea home of Lord and Lady Westbury on St Patrick's night in 1993, crockery and cutlery were delivered from the Buckingham Palace kitchens. A servant carrying the boxes into the apartment in Ropers Orchard off Danvers Street explained that the Queen 'liked her own things'. The mild-mannered hosts took no offence. David Westbury's mother had grown up with the Queen Mother and it was his father who had discovered Tutankhamen's tomb with the archaeologist Howard Carter and the then Earl of Carnarvon, grandfather of the Queen's friend, Lord Porchester. The Queen was particularly fond of Ursula Westbury, whose coming-out dance she had attended. Lord Scarborough, a member of the Westburys' Yorkshire racing set, and the former deputy prime minister Lord Whitelaw, were among the ten guests but neither would discuss the outing afterwards, beyond Willie Whitelaw's curt observation that it was 'a wholly private affair'.

Her Majesty's prospective hosts also had to be made aware of what she would and would not eat and drink. They were informed by the Palace that, unlike her husband, the Queen never touched oysters and usually avoided red meat. Furthermore, no one was permitted to serve her veal after the television writer Carla Lane wrote to her about the cruelty involved in its production. She preferred simple dishes to gourmet meals and liked her chicken and fish gently spiced with ginger, lime and lemongrass. 'The Queen is no fan of garlic,' said her former cook, the Swedish-born Mrs Alma McKee who also volunteered that Prince Charles enjoyed banana and jam sandwiches and often asked for meat balls.

Another royal cook, the Buckingham Palace chef Colin Alderson, made it known that the Queen liked a poached egg for breakfast served in a hollowed-out slice of fried bread and that Prince Philip always took with him to Ascot a box fitted with twelve tiny drawers which had to be filled with bite-sized sandwiches. On special days, the Queen ordered rabbit to be prepared for the royal corgis and on one of those occasions, when
Watership Down
was the movie of the moment, a houseman was scolded by the Queen for jesting as he fed them the morsels: 'You've seen the film, you've read the book, now eat the cast.'

Aboard the Royal Train, she invariably asked for fish and the fishmonger was required to produce sole, salmon, lobster and smoked Scotch haddock for long journeys. When travelling the Queen carried ample quantities of Earl Grey, Chinese and Indian teas along with her favourite chunky-cut marmalade. Foreign servants noted that at tea time she would serve Prince Philip personally, cutting the bread and even stirring his tea for him.

Eating in Third World countries, the Queen developed the ploy of pushing heavily-spiced items to one side and pecking with such apparent appreciation at the rest that no host could take offence, although on a 1986 visit to China she was unable to avoid one delicacy served at a banquet: sea slugs. 'They're quite delicious,' she told her host, President Li Xiannian.

Like her eldest son, she never liked champagne but hosts would be advised in advance that she did enjoy a glass of white wine (preferably German) with her food.

All of these traits more or less ran in the Family. Queen Victoria, for instance, insisted that her breakfast egg was served in a gold egg-cup and she ate it with a gold spoon. Eccentricity wasn't at all unusual. Her Majesty's great-grandmother, Queen Alexandra, gave away priceless heirlooms like these on a whim to friends. Lord Esher, the most tactful courtier of his time, was entrusted with the delicate task of getting them back. Not unnaturally, the Windsors liked to hang on to their treasures.

ELIZABETH was born to the Duchess of York at two forty a.m. on 21 April, 1926, exactly six months after Alexandra's death at Sandringham. To honour her memory, the little princess was christened Elizabeth Alexandra Mary, but she called herself Lilibet. The birth took place at the home of her mother's parents, the Earl and Countess of Strathmore, at 17 Bruton Street, Mayfair, later the headquarters of a property company. Margaret Rose arrived four years later at Glamis Castle and the two sisters were raised in a twenty-five-bedroom house at 145 Piccadilly, later the Inter-Continental Hotel.

As a child, Elizabeth kept a stable of wooden horses in the upstairs nursery. Each morning, they would be wheeled about for exercise after first being groomed and saddled. When Margaret was old enough, she was enlisted as a stable hand and Elizabeth taught her the routine. As there were thirty horses in the collection, each with its own name, there was a lot to take in. Moreover, the horses had to be unsaddled and stabled every evening before bedtime. Elizabeth would not go to sleep until the ritual had been carried out to her satisfaction. It wasn't so much a game, Elizabeth explained seriously, more an education for later life. She never forgot she was a princess of the royal blood.

She was just as fussy about her clothes. Unless she had checked several times that her shoes were placed side by side in the right order and her dresses neatly arranged, she was unable to go to sleep. Diana was said to have adopted a similar compulsive habit during stressful times in her marriage. Sweets were also given fastidious treatment. 'The two little girls had their own way of dealing with their barley sugar,' recalled Marion Crawford, their governess, in her bestselling royal book,
The Little Princesses.
'Margaret kept the whole lot in her small, hot hand and pushed them into her mouth. Lilibet, however, carefully sorted hers out on the table, large and small pieces together, and then ate them very daintily and methodically.'

Elizabeth grew up a happy, confident child who was the apple of King George V's eye. Her grandfather doted on her, but she was never spoiled, although she had toys, clothes, jewels and luxuries beyond even the richest child's dreams. She was only nine when the King died and Uncle David, who read stories to the little girls, ascended the throne.

Her parents spent weekends at Royal Lodge, a large pink house with flat white battlements in Windsor Great Park, where Elizabeth loved to saddle up real ponies. She and Margaret chased their pet corgis through the grounds and played games on the crazy paving in a sunken rose garden.

It was in April 1936 that Uncle David, or Edward VIII as she tried to remember, turned up unexpectedly one afternoon, steering an American station wagon into the circular driveway. Out stepped four strangers, one of them a striking woman.

'Crawfie, who
is
she?' Elizabeth asked her governess, puzzled by the American accent, lacquered mahogany hair and tailored clothes. Inside the drawing room the woman strode over to a window and summoned the King to her side. 'David, don't you think those trees could be cut down and part of that hill removed?' she asked. 'There'd be a much better view then.' There was a stunned silence from the Duke and Duchess of York, who were being reminded that the King was their landlord.

After tea the princesses watched from an upstairs window as the visitors departed in the big American car. Elizabeth, Wallis Simpson recalled, was 'a long, slender, beautifully made child', and Margaret 'an enchanting doll-like child with a small, fat face'. Long before they met again, Mrs Simpson's sway would have scarred the House of Windsor forever.

ELIZABETH fell madly in love with Prince Philip when she was a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl and, if she ever loved another man, it was love of a different kind.

Prince Philip of Greece had seen the Princess at the wedding of his cousin, Princess Marina, to the Duke of Kent and, after the Abdication, at the coronation of George VI. But they first met in July 1939, just before the outbreak of war, at the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth in Devon. The eighteen-year-old cadet turned up at the home of his commanding officer to pay his respects to King George VI and his daughters. He was, said Crawfie, 'a fair-haired boy, rather like a Viking, with a sharp face and piercing blue eyes'.

He suggested that the young sisters should accompany him to the tennis courts for 'some real fun jumping the nets'. 'She (Elizabeth) never took her eyes off him the whole time,' Crawfie recalled. 'Lilibet said, "How good he is, Crawfie! How high he can jump!" '

As Elizabeth and her family sailed away in the old Royal Yacht,
Victoria & Albert,
Philip and some other cadets gave chase in small boats. Long after the others had given up, Philip kept going, waving and shouting. 'The young fool,' stormed the King, fearing for his safety. 'He must go back.' It was only the first time that Philip would raise the royal blood pressure. But the effect on Princess Elizabeth was mesmeric. She 'watched him fondly through an enormous pair of binoculars' until he disappeared from sight.

The hand of Lord Louis Mountbatten had been instrumental in arranging that auspicious first meeting. Elizabeth's tender age failed to cause Philip's uncle the slightest discomfort. He had been in Dartmouth to make sure things went smoothly. Philip's performance, he noted, had been 'a great success'.

A marriage between the House of Windsor and a member of his family, between Elizabeth and Philip to be precise, fitted into his plan for a Mountbatten Lineage among Britain's royal dynasties. His next step was to arrange a posting for Philip on HMS
Ramillies.
When Philip went on board on 24 February, 1940, in Colombo, Ceylon, he introduced himself to the ship's captain, Harold Baillie-Grohman. 'My uncle has ideas for me,' he told his commanding officer. 'He thinks I should marry Princess Elizabeth.'

'Are you fond of her?' asked the captain, startled by such impudence.

'Oh yes,' Philip replied cheerily, 'I write to her every week.'

Apart from brief encounters during Philip's home leave, the courtship was conducted largely through the Royal Mail. Mountbatten was ecstatic when Philip informed him that Elizabeth had accepted him at Balmoral on 11 August, 1946. She made her decision without telling her parents. The King was furious.

To overcome one of the monarch's objections, Philip volunteered to drop his Greek title and call himself Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten RN. He would also apply for British citizenship. When Elizabeth agreed to wait until she had turned twenty-one, the King realised that he was fighting a losing battle. 'I was rather afraid that you had thought I was being hardhearted about it,' the King wrote to Elizabeth when she was wearing Philip's wedding ring. 'I was so anxious for you to come to South Africa as you knew. I can see you are sublimely happy with Philip which is right but don't forget us.'

On the evening of her birthday, Elizabeth made a broadcast during the South African tour, binding herself to the monarchy, 'I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial Commonwealth to which we all belong. But I shall not have the strength to carry out this resolution unless you join in with me, as I now invite you to do; I know that your support will be unfailingly given. God bless all of you who are willing to share it.'

Her sincerity touched Philip deeply, knowing as he did that she intended him to be her Prince Consort in this lifelong commitment. Pushed by his wife, King George finally gave his official blessing to the betrothal on 9 July, 1947. For the couple's marital home, the King acquired a twenty-five-roomed house called Sunninghill Park. Set in 668 pleasant acres in the Royal County of Berkshire close to Windsor Castle, the residence had been used as an air force base during the war but had been extensively damaged by fire. Just two weeks after workmen started rebuilding it, another fire destroyed the south wing. A new house would not rise from the ruins until Elizabeth's favourite son, Prince Andrew, had written a new chapter in royal romance.