Just Like Us

Often, as she returns from her weekend at Windsor on a Monday morning, the Queen is held up by traffic. On one occasion she was waiting patiently in a great queue in Hyde Park when she became aware of a commotion behind her. She peered round to see blue flashing lights, police mounted on motorcycles and, in the middle of it all, an important limousine being escorted up the clear side of the road in the wrong direction. Who could it be? As the car flashed by, the Queen caught the unmistakable big hair and noble profile of Princess Michael of Kent.

‘I don’t find it easy myself,’ the Queen remarked to some women on a housing estate who were complaining that they couldn’t keep their floors clean.

The Royal Family are now obliged to share the beach at Holkham in Norfolk, where they have a beach hut, with nudists. The Queen Mother took an enlightened view, telling Lord Gowrie that ‘When the nudists see me, they scamper away into the dunes with their dear little white bottoms fluttering.’

Trying on clothes one day in her middle years, the Queen became skittish. A particular black dress, not her usual taste, entranced her. She pinned on a diamond brooch and flung a mink stole over her shoulder. Standing before the mirror in a Jean Harlow pose, she said, ‘Now, if only someone would ask me to something really smart.’

At a jewellery fair at Grosvenor House, the Queen Mother approached a stall holder and pointed to a gigantic brooch. ‘I’ve got one like that at home,’ she said.

The owner of an exclusive fabric shop in a run-down part of London was used to seeing great ladies picking their way from their limousines, through the cabbage leaves scattered on the pavement, and into his shop. But it was something of a surprise to come from his back office and find the Princess of Wales sprawled on the floor and the contents of her handbag strewn about her. On entering she had somehow lost her footing and gone flying. She insisted on picking up the lipstick, comb, keys and so forth herself.

Germaine Greer was appalled while on holiday in Greece to learn that she was destined to dine with Princess Margaret who was staying nearby. She hadn’t a thing to wear and her hair was a mess. When she arrived, Professor Greer found herself subject to solicitous attention. ‘Use my room, if you want to tidy your hair,’ Princess Margaret said. In the room was an array of silver-backed brushes. As Greer hesitated, not daring to touch them, Princess Margaret materialised behind her, a little like Jeeves, it would seem. ‘Come on, let me help you,’ the Princess said, and taking up the brushes and combs, set about tending to the iconoclast’s ravaged hair.

In old age, Queen Mary had a few regrets. One of them, which she confided in the Queen Mother, was that she had never climbed over a fence.

Sir Owen Morshead, the Royal Librarian at Windsor, revealed that, in the 1950s, the Queen became interested in Marilyn Monroe. One day she mused, ‘I wonder what it must be like to be the most famous woman in the world.’

‘Did you find it all right?’ inquired the Queen as she greeted one of Prince Charles’s girlfriends at Windsor Castle.

During the last war, Queen Mary used to give lifts to young soldiers. She found such contact with ordinary people most interesting. It is mot recorded what the soldiers thought – one moment trudging along the road, the next in the back of a Daimler with Queen Mary.