The Queen Mother (17 page)

Elizabeth found the waiting almost unbearable. ‘Somehow I never thought anything could happen to Mike,’ she wrote to Beryl; ‘everybody is so fond of him, but one forgets that doesn’t count in a War.’ Her mother was in a terrible state, she reported. Patrick was also at St James’s Square waiting for a medical board, and he too was in a bad way. She apologized for writing ‘such a depressed letter, and
how
I hope the next one will be mad & full of the usual rubbish. He [Mike] said in his last letter you know, “If I’m pipped, I think little John had better have my guns,” and so he knew they were going to have a bad
time I suppose.’
¹⁵⁸
(John was Patrick’s son.) Feeling utterly wretched, Elizabeth took the train down to London on 7 May to be with her mother. By 12 May she was in bed with a temperature and a swollen face and neck, either one of her bad colds or perhaps, she thought, even measles.
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According to family legend, David was the only one who remained optimistic. He was thought to have some powers of second sight; he maintained, apparently, that he knew Mike was not dead because he had ‘seen’ him, in a house surrounded with fir trees, with his head bandaged.
¹⁶⁰
His sister’s anxious letters at this time make no mention of this, but if the story is true, David was proved right. On the morning of 22 May, the telephone rang at St James’s Square. It was Cox’s bank saying that they had just received a cheque drawn by Mike since he went missing. He was a prisoner of war. Elizabeth wrote at once to Beryl:

A stream of friends and relations called at the house to give their congratulations on Mike’s survival. Barson, the devoted butler, naturally ‘had a good old bust-up in honour of Mike! Mosh (hic) aushpishush auccashun (hic). What o,’ Elizabeth wrote to Beryl as she lay in front of the fire drying her hair. She suggested they go to the theatre together to celebrate.
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Soon there came a postcard from Mike himself. Dated 4 May, it had taken over a month to be delivered. He wrote:

Eventually Elizabeth received a long letter in Mike’s familiar bantering style, addressed to ‘My darling Buffy’ and written from a prisoner-of-war camp at Ströhen, Hanover. Two or three lines of it – apparently about the camp food – were heavily inked out by the censor. Mike hoped his sister was having a good time dancing with Captain Phillips and could remember all the steps of the foxtrot. Not surprisingly, food and drink were his main interest. He asked for a weekly supply of flour, dripping and baking powder to make scones, and also macaroni, Cadbury’s peppermint creams, plain chocolate and some cheap tobacco to roll his own cigarettes. He thought longingly of home: ‘PW must be heavenly now & I suppose the strawberries are ripe now. How I should love to be crawling flat on my stomach under a net! We don’t git no champagne, clarit, mosal or beeeer here wust look. I expect someone will censor that, at least I don’t suppose they will realise that it is Hertfordshire, and concerns wet things.’
¹⁶⁴

Mike received his first letters, from May and Elizabeth, at the end of June. ‘Great joy!’ To his consternation, however, the letters did not mention sending food.
¹⁶⁵
By August the message had got through: he wrote to say that he had received sixty-nine parcels.
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In September he was moved to comparative luxury at Neu Brandenburg, where he reported that he was able to bathe daily in a lake, and had a soft bed and a balcony;
¹⁶⁷
later he was transferred to Schweidnitz in Silesia. His letters to his mother show that Elizabeth continued to write to him with lively accounts of her social life, but her letters have not survived.
¹⁶⁸

On her return to Glamis in glorious weather in the middle of June 1917, Elizabeth found new patients – ‘sixteen strange shy enormous
men’ lying on the lawn, she reported to Beryl. They politely saluted her and she talked to some of them at once, but she was more self-conscious than she had been when younger. ‘We are so mutually afraid of each other!’ The Clerk of the Forfar School Board had written to ask her to present medals and prizes at the school. She was terrified but her mother made it clear that it was her duty to agree. ‘I
had
to accept, and I
know
I shall die. It’s
too
dreadful, and the worst of it is, I
KNOW
Sister & the boys will want to come, oh it’s
terrible
. I dream, or rather have nightmares about it!’
¹⁶⁹
Beryl was evidently not much impressed with her nervousness and Elizabeth complained that she was ‘horribly unsympathetic … It’s
too
awful! Swine!’
¹⁷⁰
Afterwards she protested that she had been ‘petrified’. There were many speeches; ‘I, of course, made a
long
one, touching on many points including The Food Question, Education, Star Worship etc etc. It was greatly appreciated I assure you.’
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When she got to know the new soldiers, she liked them – as she usually did. Just one of them was ‘very good looking’. She was curious about people and was becoming more discriminating; she was meeting not only convalescent soldiers, but officers from the Dominions needing hospitality while on leave from the Front. As well as giving parties for Australian officers at St James’s Square, the Strathmores opened Glamis to them – and their Canadian and New Zealand counterparts. ‘One very “interesting” one yesterday,’ Elizabeth wrote. ‘That’s the
only
way I can describe him. Tall, blue eyes, very keen kind of face, clever & a
terrific
accent.’
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She was somewhat embarrassed by a New Zealander, Lieutenant J. B. Parker. ‘He is rather an old fashioned young man, & he paid me wonderful & weird compliments at all times.’ She asked him how he thought of so many polite things to say, and he replied that ‘he did’nt think of them, they came from his heart! I laughed. I could’nt help it! Poor young man – he’ll recover all right.’
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She was beginning to distinguish between men. ‘Its funny how dull some men are, whilst others are so interesting. On one hand a little pipsqueak, with pink cheeks & a toothbrush moustache, whose only conversation is about theatres, the War & himself. And on the other hand a man who
could’nt
look a pipsqueak if he tried, who has lived by himself & observed nature – there are
such
a lot of pipsqueaks!!! I shall be seventeen soon. Damn. I don’t want to get any older.’
¹⁷⁴

The rain that July was terrible; the crops at Glamis were flattened.
Soon after her birthday Elizabeth took to her bed for two weeks with what seemed like severe influenza. It was her fourth bout of feverish illness that year and Dr Morris, the Glamis doctor, was concerned lest she had caught from the soldiers some kind of trench fever, which could affect the heart. He ordered her to bed ‘as my heart didn’t beat enough or something’.
¹⁷⁵
By the beginning of September she was still unsteady on her feet and ‘dash it all’ she was not even allowed to walk, let alone play tennis ‘as me ’eart is still weak’.
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At the end of the month she was still being dosed with raw eggs and brandy, and felt limp and tired.
¹⁷⁷

By 4 October, however, she had regained her spirits enough to enjoy a concert thrown by the soldiers at Glamis for the benefit of their colleagues at Forfar Hospital, who descended on the Castle for tea. It was a hilarious occasion.
¹⁷⁸
There was now something of a routine at Glamis. Elizabeth and her mother played and sang with the soldiers almost every evening. They would get through dozens of songs a night. One which they liked to hear her sing was ‘Wonderful Girl, Wonderful Boy, Wonderful Time’.
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Always the war continued to strike the heart – Patrick Ogilvy, third son of the Strathmores’ close neighbour, Mabell, Countess of Airlie, was killed on 9 October; his eldest brother, Lord Airlie, was home from the war ‘with very bad nerves’; and they heard that Zeppelins had dropped bombs all around St Paul’s Walden, breaking windows.
¹⁸⁰
Hopes for peace seemed to have disappeared; when General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien, who had commanded the Second Army on the Western Front in 1915, came to lunch at Glamis in September, Elizabeth was depressed to hear that ‘he didn’t think that there was any likelihood of the War ending for some time’.
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She was ever more aware of the human costs of the war. The motors that took the rested soldiers back to Dundee still brought an inexhaustible stream of more wounded men to fill their places. One day she went to Dundee Infirmary herself to visit one of her favourite patients at this time, Private C. Morris. His chest had been crushed on the battlefield, and he had been sent back from Glamis for more treatment. He was in no doubt of what he owed Elizabeth and her mother. ‘I must say that I was never treated better in any part of the British Empire than I was treated at Glamis Castle,’ he wrote to her, ‘and I don’t quite know how to thank the Strathmore family for all the kindness they have shown towards me.’
¹⁸²
He finally recovered and
Elizabeth was delighted when her parents offered him a job as a gardener at St Paul’s Walden.
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She found nothing so difficult as saying goodbye to men returning to the Front. At the end of November she had ‘a nerve racking and terrible experience – bidding goodbye to
FOURTEEN
men!’ Among them was a sergeant to whom she had taken ‘a violent affection’ at the last minute – he was dreadfully ugly but so nice that she ‘begged Sister to push him downstairs or give him a blister or something’ so that he could remain at Glamis. ‘It’s so dreadful saying goodbye, because one knows that one will never see them again, and I
hate
doing it.’

She always went to make her farewells after dinner, because the men would be driven away in the early morning and also because ‘Sister likes to show me off in evening dress, because they never have seen evening dresses which embarrasses me
too
dreadfully. They invariably look at my shoes, except the ones that gaze rapturously into my eyes sighing deeply all the while …’ She was aware how much she had changed since she was a child at the start of the war: ‘oh! the difference from Dec. 1914! I was just remembering this evening, that night when Mr Brookes, Harold Ward, Teddy Daird (in pyjamas) & I had a bun fight in the crypt, and David chased Nurse A round the Ward with cocoa & water to pour, & how it all got spilt on the floor, & her black fury!! It
was
fun – weren’t they darlings?’
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Meanwhile groups of Australian and New Zealand officers came and went, to mixed reactions from their young hostess. There was a Mr Stubbins, who insisted on trying to teach her all about motors ‘& I don’t understand & go to sleep’. To avoid him and other boring men, ‘Mother & I have to pretend that we are going away on Saturday! … It’s always worse when there is no male member of the family, I don’t count Father because he so rarely appears.’ Elizabeth was exasperated by Stubbins – ‘the first time I’ve ever scolded a man, &
very
successful it was. He was most penitent & I forgave him!! Just like a dog, the more you beat him (for a reason) the more he likes you – alas!’
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Few people elicited such negative reactions.

At around this time Elizabeth had what appears to have been her first proposal of marriage; it was from the New Zealander, Lieutenant Parker. He asked her if her birthday were between 1 and 10 August, claiming that he had read an astrological book from which he had
calculated that ‘the’ person for him would be born between those dates.
¹⁸⁶
To Beryl she wrote Mr Parker had sent her ‘a – no, I don’t think I’ll tell you. I can’t.’
¹⁸⁷

She thought they would ‘be migrating south soon to the land of bombs & war alarms & “excursions” ’.
¹⁸⁸
In the event they had to stay at Glamis while a new ward of twelve more beds was created and an additional nurse recruited.
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But on 12 December, after tearful farewells, Elizabeth and her mother boarded the night train to London. When they arrived they heard that her sister Rose and Wisp Leveson-Gower had had a daughter. ‘Isn’t it exciting!’ Elizabeth wrote. ‘They’ll have to call her Wisperina or Wisperia or something!’
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At around the same time Jock and Neva also had a daughter, Anne, and Elizabeth hoped that she would help take the place of Patricia, their firstborn who had died aged only eleven months in June 1917. Jock had been invalided out of the army, joined the Foreign Office and been sent to Washington. To Elizabeth’s delight, Neva had written to say that her maid in Washington had met an English soldier who had been at Glamis: ‘He apparently raved about it, & its heavenliness, & about me, & said he’d never forget me (!!), and who do you think it was? Dear Sergeant Broadhead!! Isn’t that a curious coincidence? In all that
huge
continent, that the maid should have met a man who knew our family! He is training American recruits.
Such
a darling he was.’
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