The Queen Mother (122 page)

Shock can dull grief and when the shock of the King’s death began to wear off, the Queen Mother felt increasingly wretched. To her brother David she wrote that she could not envisage life without the King – ‘he was so much, & such a big part of one’s own life, & things can never be the same again without his energy, & fun & goodness & kindness. He really was the kindest and most
selfless
person I have ever known … At the moment one simply cannot take any interest in
anything.
’
²⁸
Everything was painful; some of her letters echoed the sensibility which had led her to observe in 1944 that young soldiers contemplating the horrors of war found the beauty of the countryside hard to bear. To Lascelles she wrote that a beautiful day ‘is almost unbearable, & seems to make everything a thousand times worse. I suppose it will get better some day.’
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She appreciated the rallying of friends. Thanking Bobbety Salisbury for his comforting letter, she wrote,

Her friends did all they could. Doris Vyner was as important as any and the Queen continued to slip around to her flat secretly, as she had in the last months of the King’s illness, just to be alone with kindness and companionship she had known almost all her life. Doris understood how desperately she had needed the King and she commented that without him her ‘mainspring’ had gone. Indeed Doris pointed out to mutual friends whom she trusted that although everyone thought that the Queen had energized the King and kept him up
to his work, in fact the opposite was true. The initiatives almost all came from the King – he had had to make the decisions. Now she was quite lost without him.
³¹

D’Arcy Osborne understood some of this. He wrote to her from Rome late one night and said he would not read his letter through in case he then threw it away as he had already done other such letters to her. He wished he could help her in all the painful adjustments she was facing.
³²
Betty Bowes Lyon, the wife of her brother Mike, told her that she had a very rare gift with people, like the gift of healing, ‘and You
MUST GO ON
using it.’
³³
Understandably, she became more dependent upon her own family, in particular her brother David, who helped to put her life and finances into order and perspective. She told him, ‘now that Bertie has gone, you are the only person to whom I can turn … Thank you again darling for all your angelicness, Your very loving, Elizabeth.’
³⁴

She rarely let her grief show, and her ladies in waiting saw little of her anguish. Katie Seymour, who had known her since they were both in their teens, wrote: ‘She varies from day to day,
never
shows anything but
supreme
self control.’
³⁵
If she did break down, she was embarrassed. In April she wrote to Delia Peel to apologize for being ‘so silly’ and for being unable to tell her to her face how much she valued her help.
³⁶
She did express herself quite openly to Osbert Sitwell, saying that she felt it so hard to realize that the King had gone. ‘He was so young to die, and was becoming so wise in his Kingship. He was so kind too and had a sort of natural nobility of thought and life, which sometimes made me ashamed of my narrower & more feminine point of view.’
³⁷

One letter in particular nourished her. It was from Lord Davidson, who sent her his account of how he had encouraged the nervous Duke of York to pursue his quest for her in 1922. Davidson wrote, with great charm, that he had kept the story in the secret recesses of his memory and was only now releasing it ‘because in Your Majesty’s terrible loneliness I believe that it may bring one tiny grain of comfort’.
³⁸
She thanked him warmly: ‘As you told me your story so well, & so delicately, I must tell you that we were ideally happy, due to the King’s wonderful kindness & goodness and thought for others. I never wanted to be with anyone but him.’
³⁹

Her mood changed all the time, as might well have been expected. To Arthur Penn she wrote, ‘It is difficult to make any real plans as
yet.’
⁴⁰
She confided to Lady Salisbury that sorrow was devastating. ‘I find everything a perpetual battle & struggle. But, as you know, the King never gave in, and I am determined to try & do what he would have wished.’
⁴¹
She wrote in similar vein to Cecil Boyd-Rochfort, the royal racehorse trainer.
⁴²
At the end of April she went to a dinner with friends. According to Osbert Sitwell, ‘a sudden roar’ went up at the dining table which he took to be an indication of delight from everyone that the Queen Mother was among them once more.
⁴³
She thought that ‘the noise was so terrific and the plunge for me so sudden that I felt slightly bewildered’.
⁴⁴

Meanwhile she observed formalities. She received deputations from the Houses of Lords and Commons who presented addresses of condolence; she replied to each address. During the spring she fulfilled other commitments. Her first major official engagement after the death of the King took place on 13 May 1952. It was in fact an initiative of her own. She had always made a point of trying to see her regiments before they were sent off overseas, and when she heard that the 1st Battalion of her beloved Black Watch had been ordered to the war in Korea,
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she asked if a visit to the battalion could be arranged for her.
⁴⁵
Despite a bad cold she flew to Scotland to inspect them at Crail Camp in Fife. Dressed in black, she wore the diamond regimental brooch that General Sir Archibald Cameron had presented to her when she became colonel-in-chief in 1937. Five hundred men paraded before her, each wearing a black armband. She praised the regiment ‘so dear to my heart and to many of my family’; then she met relatives and Old Comrades, visited the sergeants’ mess and lunched with the officers before flying back to London.
⁴⁶

On 23 May she and Princess Margaret had an adventure. Together with Lord and Lady Salisbury, they visited the de Havilland factory near Hatfield and were taken for a four-hour flight in the Comet, the revolutionary jet airliner, over Geneva and Mont Blanc. On board was Sir Miles Thomas, the Chairman of the national airline, the British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC), who later wrote an account of
the flight in his autobiography,
Out on a Wing
. The Comet flew over Italy and the north of Corsica as well; they reached 500 mph and Queen Elizabeth asked how fast they could go. The pilot suggested she push the control column forward – they reached 525 mph, touching the red danger section on the airspeed indicator. The aeroplane began to ‘porpoise’, showing that it was at the limit of its aerodynamic stability. Comets later proved to have a structural weakness which led to fatal crashes until the fault was put right, and Thomas wrote that he shuddered whenever he remembered this flight.
⁴⁷
Queen Elizabeth, however, was quite unperturbed by the aircraft’s erratic movement. ‘The Viking will seem a little slow after this,’ she said, and sent a radio message to No. 600 Squadron of the Royal Auxiliary Air Force at Biggin Hill, of which she was Honorary Air Commodore. ‘I am delighted to tell you that today I took over as first pilot of the Comet aircraft. We exceeded a reading of Mach 0.8 at 40,000 feet. What the passengers thought I really would not like to say!’
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In early June 1952 she went north to Scotland, first – and rather sadly – to Balmoral. Every part of it evoked memories of the King, she told Queen Mary. ‘He was always so full of plans & ideas for improving house & garden, & we spent so many happy hours here. Life seems incredibly meaningless without him – I miss him every moment of the day.’
⁴⁹
After a week, she flew on up to Wick to stay with Clare and Doris Vyner in Caithness, on the very northern tip of mainland Britain, close to John o’Groats.

Caithness is a barren, surprisingly flat county, sometimes called ‘the Lowlands beyond the Highlands’. Windswept and austere, it forms the north-eastern corner of Britain. For much of the Victorian era, fishing for herring – ‘the silver darlings’ – provided most of the work and the income of Caithness, and when that fishing declined, so did the population. By the early 1950s Caithness was really the end of Britain, one of the poorest regions of the country, with many unmade roads and very few people.

The Vyners had a home almost as far north as the land stretched, on Dunnet Head, a fist of rock which jabs out into the Pentland Firth just south of the Orkney Islands. Their large white house was romantically named The House of the Northern Gate. It was utterly alone and remote, and the wind used to lift the carpets. It was the first place Queen Elizabeth had been to since February that had no associations with the King and she gained relaxation and peace from
it.
⁵⁰
To her great surprise, this visit to Caithness offered her a new interest, one which was to provide her enormous pleasure for the rest of her life.

One day she drove with the Vyners east along the little coast road towards John o’Groats. Between the road and the waves, she said much later, they suddenly saw ‘this romantic looking castle down by the sea’. They drove down the track towards it and found it was quite empty. ‘And then the next day we discovered it was going to be pulled down and I thought this would be a terrible pity. One had seen so much destruction in one’s life.’
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The Castle, named Barrogill, had a superb position, right on the sea, overlooking Orkney, but it was in terrible condition. It had been commandeered during the war and used for troop accommodation. No maintenance had been carried out. The roof was in a disastrous state, and a violent storm in spring 1952 had caused serious damage. Now no one wanted it. The Queen Mother was immediately attracted to the Castle, and was determined to preserve it.

The owner, Captain Imbert-Terry, was delighted by her interest. He offered to give the Castle to her for nothing. This she declined, but she accepted his suggestion of a nominal price of £100. She decided to change the name from Barrogill to its more romantic original name, the Castle of Mey. It was the only house that ever belonged to her.

The Vyners were overjoyed that she was to become their neighbour in the wild. Doris Vyner wrote to her: ‘You’ve no idea what a wonderful thing it is for
us
all this – to be able to be of use – and to have such an enthralling thing to think about instead of the usual gloomy thoughts.’
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Clare Vyner arranged for the Queen Mother to buy some more land along the coast at a cost of some £300; the grazing would provide an income of about £30 a year and, when a small shoot was developed, it could bring in a rent of about £200 a year. ‘It would thus all work in quite economically for you & although not a good shoot would amuse Your Majesty’s guests & give food for the table.’
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Doris Vyner went around local antique shops and found old and inexpensive furniture for her to buy – one extensive list cost £124. She also arranged for electricity to be brought to the Castle.
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She wrote to Queen Elizabeth, ‘I do long for Castle Mey, because I know you’ll feel happy in a way there. I’m sure the King would love you to be by the
sea
looking at that such important part of
his life
– Scapa Flow etc etc, Oh dear – you
are
so brave.’
⁵⁵

For the time being the Queen Mother kept her plan secret. It was not until early August that she told Arthur Penn, her Treasurer, of what she had in mind. She planned to ‘escape there occasionally when life became hideous’, she told him. ‘Do you think me
mad
?’
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The news of her purchase came out in the newspapers towards the end of August 1952, and she wrote to her friends and family explaining what she had done. Perhaps nervous of the likely reaction of her cautious mother-in-law, in her letter to Queen Mary she played down the task she had taken on. She had been told that the Castle was going to ‘crumble away’, she wrote, ‘and I felt that it was such a wrong thing to happen to an interesting old place’.
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Queen Mary owned that she had been surprised to learn from the press the ‘exciting’ news that Queen Elizabeth had bought herself an isolated castle. She feared she would not see it ‘as my travelling days are over’.
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May Elphinstone wished that Mey were not so far away.
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To the Queen Mother that was part of the attraction – she loved being in Caithness because it was Scotland, to which she was devoted, and yet a part of Scotland which had no memories of happier days. She saw the Castle as emblematic of her own life. It gave her and many of her friends and courtiers great joy in the decades to come.

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A
S THE SUMMER
of 1952 progressed, she started to undertake more official engagements. In the first ten days of July she received representatives of the Royal Society of Arts, attended a concert given by the Bar Musical Society at the Middle Temple, paid visits to the Home for Retired Congregational Ministers and their wives in Sussex and to the Royal College of Art, received several ambassadors and their wives, attended a garden party at Lambeth Palace, and made her annual visit to the London Garden Society.