May 1946
Buckingham Palace, London
Lilibet stood in the center of her palace apartments, her arms folded across her bosom and her head on one side.
“No, no, that’s much too formal.” She rejected the Louis Philippe Sèvres with a dismissive wave of her hand. Two footmen started to stack the rejected plates onto trays.
“Do you even know what you want?” Margaret was losing patience. “What about the old blue-and-white Willow pattern from the kitchen?”
“Something simpler, something plainer. I can’t remember what it’s called.”
“You can downplay things too much, you know.” Margaret’s tone held a warning. She tilted her head back and stared down her nose at Lilibet. The last thing we needed was a falling-out between the sisters.
“The Royal Worcester is white with just a plain gold band at the rim. Would that do?” I asked.
“What does it matter, Lilibet?” Margaret thumped plates around on the table, and I winced. “You never notice what you are eating, never mind the wretched china, and I am sure Philip doesn’t notice either.”
Lilibet turned to a footman hovering with an ornate arrangement of roses. “No, please take them away. I feel like I’m in Mummy’s bedroom.” She turned and walked slowly into her drawing room, as if seeing it for the first time. “Crawfie, what on earth is wrong with this room? The last time Philip came to lunch, he took one look and asked me when I would be completely settled in. Does it look so uninviting?” Margaret pressed her lips together; she wasn’t going to advise her sister in this mood. They had already had several arguments about what Lilibet should wear. “Perhaps we might move that sofa over there?”
Two rather hot-faced footmen lifted a heavy sofa and moved it a couple of feet toward the wall.
“Oh dear, I think that’s worse.” Lilibet caught her bottom lip with her teeth.
“Just get rid of the thing altogether; there are too many of them. You only need one sofa here, and then two chairs, here and here. The smaller ones can go back against the wall or form a little group here.” Margaret waved away the sofa, and it was removed from the room.
“There, that’s better, not so cluttered.” Lilibet turned and surveyed the dining area that opened off her drawing room, an area of her apartments that she never used. “What time is it?”
“Five o’clock. Come on, Lil.” Margaret took her by the arm and led her to the door. “Let’s walk the dogs. Fresh air and lots of it is what we both need. What did you order for dinner, by the way?”
“Lamb chops and mint sauce . . . what? Why are you laughing?”
“Followed by apple tart?”
Lilibet looked at the two of us with our hands over our mouths. “He likes lamb and apple tart. What’s wrong with it? It’s simple and filling.” I prayed she had some other more romantic ideas for after dinner.
“Lamb chops? Lovely!” Prince Philip of Greece picked up his knife and fork with the gusto of a man used to eating his rations in a crowded wardroom. Margaret, as fastidious about food as she was about her wardrobe, picked her way through dinner and for once did not take over the conversation.
“How long were you in the ATS, Lilibet?” Philip asked.
“Only about six or seven months; it was all they would let me do.”
“What did you do?”
“We were mechanics, you know; we repaired motor engines. I loved it. It was hard work, but I learned a lot about truck engines. And it was good fun. One of our instructors was a bit overwhelmed when he found out that I was in his class. He was so thrown about being ‘in the presence of a real-life HRH,’ as he put it, that he dropped everything he picked up. It was like a Charlie Chaplin film,” she said, her eyes two azure crescents of delight. “His jaw was set, his eyes were glazed, and his face a deep, fiery red. The only thing he said for five minutes was ‘S’trewth,’ under his breath. The ground around the truck’s engine was littered with bits of metal and tubing that he had fumbled and dropped, and then he lifted this huge oil can . . .” She bowed her head with laughter and then looked up at us. “And the entire group stepped back!”
It is astonishing what love can do for the introvert, I thought to myself as we rose from the table.
We took our coffee in Lilibet’s drawing room, but Philip wasn’t interested in too much sitting. He drained his coffee, put down his empty cup, and walked to the door. “Come on,” he said over his shoulder. “Don’t just sit there. I want to know what all the rooms on this floor are used for.” We followed him out of the drawing room, through the double doors, and into the corridor. Two footmen stood to attention. “You can leave us now. We’ll call you if we need anything,” Margaret said as we gathered in the wide corridor that ran east to west along the north side of the palace.
“I can’t get over the size of this place.” Philip, hands on hips, looked up and down the corridor. “Are these rooms ever used?”
“Sometimes, but normally they are just shut up,” said Lilibet. “When we were children, we got lost in the palace all the time.”
“This corridor is double the length of a bowling alley,” Philip said. “You could put skittles down that end, and bowl from here. If you order a set, I’ll show you how to play.”
He walked along the corridor, opening doors to rooms furnished with heavy and ornate furniture—most of them covered with dust sheets. “It’s like a museum, and this one looks like the set of some provincial pantomime.”
“Not a very interesting one, and most of the things in it are falling apart. But we can’t throw them away apparently, because they belong to the Crown,” said Margaret. “Lilibet, Crawfie, and I used to play hide-and-seek and sardines on this side of the palace when we had friends over for tea.”
“What a splendid idea. Sardines it is.” Philip took a penny out of his pocket and spun it in the air. “Heads or tails?” He caught the coin and slapped it down on the back of his hand, keeping it covered as Margaret shouted, “Tails!”
“Right, Margaret, you win. So off you go. We’ll count to fifty and come and find you.”
“Stay in this wing, please!” Lilibet shouted after Margaret as she picked up the skirt of her evening dress and belted down the corridor.
We covered our eyes and listened to Margaret’s receding footsteps. A door opened and shut with a bang.
“Fifty . . .” Lilibet finished counting. “She went up the corridor and turned left.” And she started to run east.
He doesn’t know about all the mid-stairs or the little hidden rooms for footmen and pages, I thought as I opened a door on the left of the corridor to the servants’ staircase, passageways, and pantries that formed a behind-the-scenes network in the center of the palace.
Ten minutes later, I squeezed into a broom cupboard and wedged in beside Margaret and Lilibet. “I haven’t hidden in here for years.” Margaret sneezed. “I’ve been squashed up in the dark surrounded by cans of Brasso and floor polish for hours. What took you all so long?” She hugged her knees and giggled as we heard Philip’s feet pounding past the concealed door.
“He’ll never find us. Come on, we have to give ourselves up. It’s not fair . . .” Lilibet whispered, but we didn’t need to break cover, because the door flew open and we all shrieked.
“You gave yourselves away.” Philip’s long shadow fell on us. “I could hear you giggling together a mile away.”
We came out from the cupboard. “And you all smell like cleaning women.” Philip carefully smoothed away a dusty cobweb from Lilibet’s glossy curls. “Good, so now I’ve got the lie of the land, I’ll hide next.”
“Oh no, you won’t,” Lilibet said. “You were last to find us, so you lost, and it’s my turn. Let’s see if you’ve really got the layout of this old mausoleum.” And she was off up the corridor.
“Who would have thought that Philip would enjoy playing nursery games?” Margaret said the next morning as we toiled away over French grammar.
They aren’t always nursery games. I smiled as I remembered Lady Elgin telling me that guests at Edwardian house parties always enjoyed playing hide-and-seek and sardines. It gave everyone a chance to arrange who would visit whose bedroom later on. “Since we are duenna and chaperone,” I told her, “we have to be alert to finding those two in a tactful but timely way—otherwise we will be derelict in our duty!”
She nodded, her face solemn. “I know all of Lilibet’s hiding spots. I just make sure I forget them when Philip comes to dinner.” I laughed at her obvious scheming.
“Why are you laughing?”
“Because if you look as if you are too hot on their trail, I am very clever at diverting you.”
“She never wants to play hide-and-seek with Porchey Porchester or even gorgeous Hugh,” Margaret pointed out. “She’s completely besotted with Philip.”
“And he with her?” I asked quickly, because sometimes I worried that after a while, the potshots about his family and Gordonstoun would take their toll, and Philip would fade from Lilibet’s life.
But Margaret knew otherwise. “Any man who has to eat lamb chops, or ghastly Dover sole, every time he visits has to be besotted, Crawfie.”
Lilibet appeared in my doorway. “Invite me in for sherry, Crawfie?”
I poured two glasses as she filled me in on Susan’s latest battle with Dookie.
“Things are looking distinctly off on the Philip front,” she said. “No sooner does one issue resolve itself, another pops up. But this one is serious because it comes from Tommy Lascelles; it is the larger of his many concerns about Philip.” She paused to gather her thoughts. “I know it is his job to keep us from inadvertently doing anything to tarnish the monarchy . . .”
“Well, he cut his teeth as an assistant private secretary when your uncle abdicated, so he knows a thing or two about tarnishing.”
Lilibet considered her glass of sherry and examined the pattern on the edge of the Turkish carpet. I bit my lip to stop myself from prompting. Finally, she lifted her eyes and gazed at me as she decided what she should reveal, and I struggled with patience.
“Mummy . . .” My heart sank. “Mummy told me that Tommy told Papa that he has quite a few concerns about Philip’s sisters. They were married to prominent Germans: Nazi sympathizers. One of them had dinner regularly with Hitler.” The slightest tightening of her lips conveyed what? Her distaste? Her disbelief? “This is not common knowledge, by the way, Crawfie, but Tommy believes that if the Great British public knew, they would be offended and upset at my marrying a man whose sisters were all married to Nazis.”
“But every German was expected to be a member of the party, Lilibet. It wasn’t a choice—the German government was fascist. Hitler was a dictator. There was no free choice, not even for ‘true Germans,’ the ones who loathed Hitler and were horrified by everything he set out to do!”
She pressed her lips together and shook her head. “Yes, I understand your point, Crawfie, but the British react very strongly to fascism—we put Sir Oswald Mosley in prison because he was leader of Britain’s fascist party.”
“There is a huge difference between having sisters who married Germans, and an Englishman starting a fascist party in England and palling around with Hitler. I am quite sure our workingmen and women can tell the difference.” I did not say that before the war there were many aristocrats in Britain who were rather partial to Hitler’s brand of politics: jealous of the success of Jewish-run businesses, full of admiration for the new Germany with its restored culture, trains that ran on time, and immaculate city streets brimming with willing workers. I braced myself with another glass of sherry. “Tommy Lascelles is only being punctilious because it is his job. But I understood that all Philip’s brothers-in-law were military men and not connected in any way with the SS or Gestapo.”
She was staring thoughtfully at the wall behind me as she continued. “Margarita, Theodora, Cecilie, and Sophie. Cecilie died with her husband and their two children in a plane crash. I think she might have been pregnant at the time. Philip was still at Gordonstoun; he went to Berlin for her funeral. It was packed with high-ranking Nazis.” I nodded. “And then there is Sophie, Philip’s youngest sister. She married Prince Christoph von Hessen, who was one of the directors for the Third Reich’s Ministry of Aviation.”
I waved Prince Christoph away. “That does not make him guilty of war crimes. He was working for his government during the war—everyone did that in every country. That does not make him a criminal.”
She took a long breath. “Sophie and Christoph named their eldest son Karl Adolf, after Hitler. Tommy says they ate dinner with Hitler regularly.”
“Oh.”
“And then there is Margarita. She married Gottfried, Prince of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, a commander in the German army. He was very pro-Hitler in 1939. Luckily toward the end of the war, he came to his senses and joined a plot organized by fellow aristocrats to assassinate Hitler and was dismissed from the army. It all sounds terrible, especially when we are inundated with the Nuremberg war crimes trials.” She dropped her head, too humiliated by what she had learned to continue. “The trials are turning up all the terrible things that happened . . .”
“And his eldest sister? Theodora?”
She shrugged her right shoulder. “I haven’t heard anything much about her, other than her husband, Berthold, flew for Germany’s Wehrmacht until he was injured.”
“But that was because he was a German. He was doing his patriotic duty, for heaven’s sake.”
I could see that she was taking this badly.
“Well, it seems Prince Gottfried tried to do the right thing, Lilibet. Don’t look so desperate. Look, Philip fought for Britain. He was on our side. If you were a German living in Germany from 1933 to 1937 it was easy to be fooled by Hitler during those years—they had no idea what his true nature was, or what his plans were. He appeared to do so much for the German people after the Allies reduced Germany to poverty and shame in the reprisals following World War I. But don’t you see? The war and what happened are finished now. Over and done with. Nazism and the Third Reich vanquished and the world at peace. I don’t think—”
Lilibet held up her hand to interrupt, her eyes bleak. “Second thing that Tommy Lascelles and Clement Attlee object to is that Philip’s father, Prince Andrew, fled Greece and lived in the South of France, Vichy France, governed by Pétain during the war.” She finished her sherry, tied a few knots in a rather grubby handkerchief. “He made no attempt to reunite with his wife and children when the war ended but went to live in Paris. Luckily for them, they were looked after by his mother’s family.” I noticed she did not use the words “philanderer,” “mistress,” or “mental asylum,” but they were relevant to the story I had heard. Either she had not been told the full facts, or she was omitting the ugly parts of Prince Andrew’s behavior, even to herself.
She sat up straight in her chair to tell me the worst. “And as it turns out, Philip isn’t actually a British citizen, so he can’t continue to serve in our navy as an officer.” She looked at me as if everyone at the palace was mad except her. “I mean, that does sound unfair, doesn’t it? He fights for us all through the war, and now it’s ‘Thank you and goodbye. Off you go; you are not one of us after all.’ ”
The boneheaded stupidity of it, I fumed to myself. Why are the English obsessed with their public schools and their stupid navy? “And the king believes these are important issues?” Had she heard these words from His Majesty, or was the queen putting her own interpretation on things?
She nodded. “I think he has to, because Tommy Lascelles and the government think they are.” She stared down at her hands, now folded quietly in her lap, and then up at me. Her frank gaze fixed itself on my face, appealing for confirmation that she had it right. “You see? It is not as simple and straightforward as we had first thought.” In a few short months Lilibet had accomplished a monumental leap of understanding that had brought her out of her nursery paddling pool into the salty ocean in which the rest of us mere mortals struggled to keep our heads above water.
But she has inherited her mother’s steel and her never-say-die determination, I thought as I watched Lilibet’s chin come up and her face take on the sort of resolve I had seen in the queen when she had made up her mind what was to happen. “But we mustn’t give up even if things are not looking quite so hopeful, must we, Crawfie?”
It seemed nonsensical to me that a great-great-grandson of Queen Victoria didn’t measure up. “Lilibet, I don’t see that any of these issues really touch on who Philip is. They are situations that surrounded his family during turbulent times.” I cleared my throat, searching for the right words. “What about his uncle, Lord Mountbatten—the man who recaptured Singapore? I heard that he is going to be our next viceroy in India. So, he obviously carries some weight. I am sure Lord Mountbatten is in support of Philip continuing here in England and will sponsor him to become a British citizen. It’s done all the time, isn’t it?” I watched her resolute expression dissolve into one close to despair.
“Yes, I wondered when you were going to ask that. It seems that Uncle Dickie is a bit of a two-edged sword: on the one hand, Clement Attlee and his cabinet approve of him because of his liberal views, but as a new prime minister, Attlee worries about supporting anything that might be controversial. It wouldn’t take much for everyone to decide they don’t like Attlee’s policies and run back to Mr. Churchill. And even though Uncle Dickie is one of Papa’s oldest friends, he finds him a bit too pushing these days.”
Or rather your mother does. I remembered that Winston Churchill, whom the king revered, was not too keen on Mountbatten and referred to him as “the man who wants to give away India.” Because part of the new viceroy’s mission to India was to ease the way for their independence.
“Why does the king think he is pushing?”
“Mountbatten is considered to be overly ambitious.” She opened her hands palms upward, as if asking for divine intervention. “He is too enthusiastic,” she explained. “It’s his style that sometimes upsets people. Anyway, it is not Papa’s way to be obvious and thrusting.” She dropped her head and shook it at Mountbatten’s determination to shine. “It annoys Papa. I think he feels that Uncle Dickie is somehow encouraging Philip to . . .” She couldn’t bring herself to finish.
To push Philip to marry you? Did it really matter that much to Uncle Dickie that his nephew marry the future Queen of England?
It was important not to let her dwell on Mountbatten’s possible engineering behind the scenes. “In England conspicuous ambition is frowned on. The approved style is to murmur nothings and look modestly down one’s nose as accolades are heaped on us. We are expected to greet acknowledged success with a polite murmur of thanks and a deprecating cough.” Lilibet laughed and the tension that had been building in the room eased up a fraction.
“When it is seen that none of Philip’s in-laws are war criminals and he has become a British citizen, I am sure you will be able to iron all these wrinkles out with His Majesty when you go north to Balmoral. It’s just a question of standing firm and not giving up.”
“I just wish that Lascelles and Adeane and all the rest of them would stop nipping at Philip’s heels.”
“They will as soon as your father gives his consent to your marriage.”
“Well, it’s all down to Balmoral, then, isn’t it, Crawfie?” She got to her feet. “Heavens, look at the time.”
“Will your uncle David be joining you at Balmoral?” I asked, and she looked surprised. So, she hadn’t worked it out about him yet.
“Yes, of course he will, but he has no say in the Philip thing at all.”
I wouldn’t be so sure of that, I thought.