The Queen Mother (106 page)

In April the family had a happy spring break at Sandringham. ‘The beauty of the countryside was amazing,’ the Queen wrote to Osbert Sitwell. ‘It was so lovely that one could hardly bear it … One could watch the leaves unfolding and the lilac coming out, & the double cherry trees blazing. How lovely it was. I noticed that some of the young soldiers minded the beauty very much – it is true that the war does make anything as glorious as England in April very agonising.’ And then, in elegiac vein, she quoted Turgenev:

‘It’s all very sad,’ she added.
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Spirits had to be sustained nonetheless. There were enjoyable interludes during family weekends at Windsor. In early May the King and Queen gave a small dance with Ambrose’s band. It was a cheerful affair, Owen Morshead reported to Queen Mary, in large part because the King was in wonderful form, dancing every dance until four in the
morning; ‘and so did the Queen, who characteristically chose the shyest boys from the Sandhurst contingent and put them completely at their ease’. It was not just the Queen who enjoyed herself. ‘Both Princesses too danced till the gunpowder ran out at the heels of their shoes.’
¹⁸³

The Allies were in the last weeks of preparing for the invasion of Europe. The Queen found the preparations for D-Day a time of enormous tension. The thought of all the deaths to come lay, she said, ‘heavy on the heart & mind’.
¹⁸⁴
Churchill felt the same. On the night of 5 June 1944, the day before D-Day, he said to his wife Clementine, ‘Do you realise that by the time you wake up in the morning twenty thousand men may have been killed?’
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The immediate casualties were in the event less terrible than expected, but still, as the Queen put it, ‘so many precious people’ lost their lives.
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By the end of the month almost 8,000 Allied soldiers had been killed since D-Day, more than half of them American.
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Both the King and Churchill had wished to accompany the invading troops, and the Queen had encouraged the King to go. But Lascelles was appalled, and had dissuaded the King, who then had a fierce argument with Churchill, one of the worst he had ever had, when he insisted that the Prime Minister must not go either. Churchill gave way – but with bad grace.
¹⁸⁸

On the night of D-Day the King made a broadcast to the country. The Queen had insisted that it should be he, not the Prime Minister, who did this. She had discussed the matter with Queen Mary during a stay at Badminton with her daughters. ‘One suggestion of yours which I think is admirable’, Queen Mary wrote to her afterwards, ‘is that Bertie shd talk to the Country when invasion starts, & not leave it to the
P.M.
or the Archbishop to do so, Bertie’s message will be far more popular. Do persuade him to do so.’
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The King took a great deal of trouble – the Bishop of Lichfield helped craft the words and Lionel Logue once again helped him deliver them. He reminded the British people of what they had suffered and achieved so far: ‘Four years ago, our Nation and Empire stood alone against an overwhelming enemy with our backs to the wall. Tested as never before in history, in God’s providence we survived the test … Now once more a supreme test has to be faced.’ He asked everyone throughout the land to take part in a worldwide vigil of prayer ‘as the great crusade sets forth’.
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Ten days later, on 16 June, the invasion had proceeded well; the fighting was now far enough inland for the King to be able to cross the Channel to the Normandy beaches where he spent the day with General Montgomery. The Queen was overwhelmed by emotion. In church on Sunday 18 June, as the Allies were pushing further into France, she told Osbert Sitwell, ‘I weakly let a tear leave my eye, thinking of the sorrows of so many good, brave people & feeling unhappy for them.’ As she did so, ‘I felt a small hand in mine, & the anxious blue eyes of Margaret Rose wondering what was the matter.’ Holding her daughter’s hand, the Queen remembered ‘with a pang’ that she had been in exactly the same situation with her own mother, Lady Strathmore, during the First World War. ‘I remembered so vividly looking up at my mother in church, & seeing tears on her cheeks, & wondering how to comfort her. She then had 4 sons in the army, & was so brave. I could not bear to think that
my
daughter should have to go through all this in another 25 years. It must
not
be.’
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That same morning, as the Queen and Princess Margaret were praying together, death came to another church in which they worshipped, the Guards Chapel in Birdcage Walk. Hitler had just launched his latest weapon against Britain – the pilotless V1 bomber. These robotic machines were described as flying bombs and came to be known as doodlebugs. They were in some ways more horrifying than almost anything that had come before. They made a sinister growling noise, rather like an ill-tuned motorcycle, and they flew at 400 mph in a straight line from launch sites across the Channel until their engines cut out. Then they fell to earth causing massive explosions and, in built-up areas, terrible damage. When people heard the engine of a doodlebug stop, they knew that it was falling and was about to explode somewhere near by and so would throw themselves under tables, into doorways, down cellar steps.

These random killers came in swarms of thousands. ‘It was as impersonal as the plague,’ wrote Evelyn Waugh, ‘as though the city were infested with enormous, venomous insects.’
¹⁹²
On one occasion, while dictating a telegram to Roosevelt, Churchill broke off his argument to inform the President, ‘At the moment a flying bomb is approaching this dwelling.’ He continued his dictation regardless and then added, ‘Bomb has fallen some way off but others are reported.’
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One of the lines along which the doodlebugs were directed seemed
to pass directly over the Houses of Parliament and then Buckingham Palace. On the morning of 18 June, a V1 engine cut out just after it had crossed the Thames and it fell, between Parliament and Palace, straight on to the Guards Chapel while the Sunday-morning service was being conducted. The nave of the chapel was smashed to pieces. The chancel and the altar were unscathed and, astonishingly, the candles remained alight. But the carnage was terrible. Sixty-three servicemen and women and fifty-eight civilian worshippers were killed; over a hundred more were wounded. Many of those who died that morning were known to the King and Queen. Among them was Olive, the sister of Arthur Penn. The Queen immediately wrote to her friend, ‘I simply cannot
tell
you how much I feel for you over this ghastly tragedy this morning … I feel quite stunned by it all and
what
you must feel – I do pray that you may be helped and sustained. Oh Arthur, it all seems so terrible – we must be brave – I know you are and I shall try all I know in
case
I can help.’
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In the first sixteen days of the V1 bombardment 1,935 civilians were killed, and by 6 July the toll had risen to 2,752.
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In the first month the doodlebugs destroyed 10,000 houses and damaged almost 200,000 more (compared with 63,000 homes destroyed during the whole 1940–1 Blitz).
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Hundreds of thousands of people fled the city. Buckingham Palace was under real threat – after the Guards Chapel was hit, another doodlebug fell on Constitution Hill, blowing out seventy-five yards of the garden wall.
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The King, the Prime Minister and the Queen took to holding their Tuesday meetings in the Palace air-raid shelter.

After four exhausting years of war the Queen, like many others, thought the doodlebugs were an infernal new punishment – ‘there is something very inhuman & beastly about death dealing missiles being launched in such an indiscriminate manner.’
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Evidently fearing the worst, she wrote a letter to Princess Elizabeth ‘in case I get “done in” by the Germans!’, explaining that she had left her own things to be divided between her and Princess Margaret and offering advice on how her jewellery might be shared. ‘Let’s hope this won’t be needed, but I
know
that you will always do the right thing, & remember to keep your temper & your word & be loving – sweet – Mummy.’
¹⁹⁹
The King, presumably with the same dangers in mind, wrote a longer letter to Princess Elizabeth explaining the provisions of his will.
²⁰⁰

As well as worrying about her human charges, the Queen worried
for those works of art still in the various palaces. Kenneth Clark told her he thought the thick walls of Windsor would protect the pictures there – he was more worried about the paintings at Hampton Court where flying glass was a greater danger. The National Gallery store was full and he suggested that, if the doodlebug campaign were likely to continue, perhaps some pictures should be taken to Balmoral.
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Churchill was so appalled by the destruction and death wrought by the flying bombs that he considered using non-lethal poison gas on the launch sites and even on the cities of the Ruhr.
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When that option was rejected, the only other defence was to shoot the flying bombs down over Kent and Sussex before they reached London. The RAF rushed all the available anti-aircraft guns close to the coast. In mid-July 1944 the King and Queen visited gun sites in Sussex and Surrey. The Queen described the way in which both the battery and fighter planes tried to shoot down the doodlebugs. ‘An occasional fighter came hurtling past on the tail of one of the robots, and one flew straight into the bursting shells, & my heart nearly stopped, as he started to wobble about, and we thought he’d been hit. However, the bomb crashed a little further on, & the fighter seemed to recover. But really war is
very
exhausting!’
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As usual, the poor areas of south and east London suffered most from the new bombardment. The King and Queen visited victims in Lambeth on 29 June. Later, however, the Queen was infuriated when she was refused permission to visit other areas hit by flying bombs. She complained to Tommy Lascelles that ‘the government does not want us to visit our own bombed out people.’
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This, he replied, was ‘not quite fair’ – and he told her that the government was trying to conceal from the Germans where exactly their bombs were falling. If she or the King visited bomb sites, the Germans would hear of it and would be able to adjust the trajectories in order to hit more built-up areas. Reluctantly the Queen had to accept this argument.
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She knew there were many other places where their presence was solicited. They visited airfields from which planes were scrambled at no notice to try and shoot down the flying bombs. Both of them were inspired by the bravery and the modesty of the young pilots.
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The King was the next source of anxiety for the Queen. On 23 July he departed on a ten-day visit to his troops in Italy under the command of General Alexander. From 23 July until 3 August, he visited battlefields old and current, watching fighting and artillery bombardments.
The night before his departure, the King wrote to his wife, ‘My darling Angel, As I am going away tonight on a journey by air I feel it is always wise to put one’s affairs in order. I am not thinking that something might happen to me while I am away from you, but there are some matters which might want clearing up.’ He stressed that she would ‘naturally go on living at Buck. Pal, in this Castle, Sandringham & Balmoral for the present until such time as Lilibet is on her own. I hope Royal Lodge, Appleton & Birkhall will always be your house on the private estates. The former is our home; the house we built & made for ourselves in Windsor Park.’
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On the evening he left, the Queen and Princess Elizabeth drove with the King to Northolt aerodrome to see him off. The Queen looked around the converted Lancaster bomber and thought it was quite comfortable. But when she went up to the cockpit, an extraordinary thing happened: ‘the first thing I saw through the glass was a flying bomb caught in the searchlights, & coming straight for the plane! I really felt, well this is too much, & averted my eye in anger! Luckily it buzzed over & was going strong when I looked again! What emotions one goes through these days.’
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She was always nervous when the King was off on such trips, but she tried to hide it – ‘he feels so much not being more in the fighting line, and I know that it heartens the troops, & one swallows one’s anxieties!’
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While the King was away, the Queen and, for the first time, Princess Elizabeth acted as Counsellors of State. The Queen kept herself busy, visiting the Girl Guide and Rangers camp at Frogmore, and ATS units at Bagshot, Aldershot and Windsor as well as the 2nd Battalion of the Home Guard under the command of her brother Mike. He had been left physically unfit by his experiences in the First World War and in 1939 he had been rejected by the army on medical grounds. The Queen had always been moved by these volunteers, and she said that as she looked at ‘these very English & some not-so-young men – it was something very difficult to put into words, such an unyielding spirit & yet so modest – I felt a lump in my throat and a great thankfulness & also a great humbleness too.’
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The effect was mutual, to judge by the letter of thanks her sister-in-law Betty Bowes Lyon wrote to her after the visit. The Queen, she said, had inspired a sense that ‘you were theirs – part of them & that they loved you
so
much they would happily die for you’.
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From General Alexander’s headquarters in Italy the King wrote to
tell her he was having ‘a very interesting time seeing a lot in lovely hot weather, a bit too hot for me but I’m dressed in shorts & a shirt … I have seen the Air Force, the US 5th Army & the Poles … Early starts in the morning, but I wake at 6.30 & bathe in the lake with Alex. He is a charming host & has told me a lot of his own thoughts … I have only been away a week & I feel it is 10 years. I hope you are not too lonely angel.’
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She had written to him hoping that ‘the tum tum tummy is behaving nicely, & not revolting at the climate, or the chianti, or the macaroni or spaghetti!’
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She was cheered by his letter – ‘I can tell everything is going alright,’ she told Tommy Lascelles.
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