Making Do

‘Whereas many of us will write a message on our hand if there is something we really must remember, the Queen writes hers on her glove.

A couturier was advising the Queen which hat to wear with her new outfit. He suggested one that she had worn some years earlier. ‘I don’t know that I could find it now,’ she said, but eventually agreed to see what she could do. Being pressed further, she said, ‘All right, we’ll see.’ The couturier was led through many miles of passages at Buckingham Palace until they reached a remote attic. ‘Try up there,’ the Queen said. The couturier stood on a chair and lifted down the box that the Queen had indicated. Inside was the hat.

A similar incident occurred with Queen Mary in the 1920s, when George V was very ill. The doctor asked for moistened cloths to be hung over the windows of the King’s bedroom to keep the air clean. Queen Mary said, ‘I know just the thing’ and conducted the doctor on a long tour through the palace to a remote attic, perhaps the same one. It contained lengths of fabric that had belonged to Queen Victoria which was just what he wanted.

The Queen always has a jigsaw on the go. She likes those 1,000 piece ones with lots of sky. To save expense, and besides they are of no interest once done and only take up room, the Queen hires them from a jigsaw club at a cost of £30 a year.

It is very annoying to the Queen that her dinner service at Windsor, which dates from George III, is missing four items. She often mentions it to her guests: once there were 280 pieces, now only…

During audiences with the Queen, people are sometimes aware that Her Majesty is making unaccountable sideways movements with her hands. But since she keeps her gaze trained perfectly on her interlocutor, they never get the chance to peer over and find out more. Thus they never see that the Queen’s jigsaw is surreptiously laid out on a low table beside her chair – in case inspiration should strike without warning.

The Queen is not, perhaps, a nurturer of plants, but she is an irrepressible weeder. At Balmoral she will spend hours tugging and wrenching in the borders.

When Prince Charles lost a dog lead at Sandringham, the Queen insisted that he go back and find it. ‘Dog leads cost money!’ the Queen informed her son matter-of-factly.

In the 1960s the Queen lost her watch while out for a walk at Sandringham. For two weeks subsequently an entire battalion of the army was set to comb the ground looking for it, which they never did.

If people were having Princess Margaret round, they tended to put themselves out. But the trouble was the longer the trail of catering vans outside the house, the greater the range and complication of the sauces, then the more she craved simplicity. Shown a sumptuous supper room with little gilt chairs hired for the occasion, she would say, ‘I don’t want to go in there. I’d rather have something on a tray by the fire. How about a boiled egg?’ For the senior diplomats, captains of industry, the great and the good of every description who were present never was there such a testing hour as when they had to coax Princess Margaret to her seat and save a party from ruin.

When Colin Clark was filming Prince Charles’s interview with Alistair Cooke at Windsor, the three of them stopped for lunch. Only there wasn’t any. Prince Charles explained that, of the Royal Family, only the Queen had the power to command lunch at Windsor. There was plenty of lunch for all the castle staff of course, but royalty, on this occasion, had to make do with chicken sandwiches out of a Tupperware box, which had been brought down from London.

When Prince Charles first went to prep school he got a stomach upset. This was apparently on account of the ‘rich’ food at the school, quite unlike what was offered at home.

At school, Prince Charles asked to be sent a toy boat because all the other boys had got one. But when it arrived it was by far the smallest.

Meeting Francis King at a Society of Authors party at the Mansion House, Prince Charles said, ‘Snap!’ and pointed downwards. They were wearing identical shoes. King had bought his in a sale at Russell and Bromley. What could this mean?

Entertaining celebrity chefs at home is as daunting for the Queen as it would be for the rest of us. When Ruth Rogers of the River Cafe, which was once voted the best restaurant in Europe, came to lunch at Buckingham Palace, the Queen said: ‘I know it’s not what you’re used to.’

During one of her intimate lunches for top people, the Queen said to one guest, ‘Now, you really must say if anything is not to your liking.’ Later it emerged that this person was an expert on wine. The Queen said, ‘What do you think of this?’ holding up her glass. The guest, mindful of her previous words, said that it could be improved upon. The Queen said, ‘I’ll see what I can do’ and a certain amount of murmuring with the butler ensued. A different bottle was produced for this visitor’s approval, which was given. When the butler had filled his glass, he made to offer some to the other guests, but the Queen said, ‘No, no, it’s just for Mr–.’

The Queen has never encouraged any fancy ways in her children. ‘Will it wash?’ she inquired of a piece of fabric when Princess Anne’s wedding trousseau was being prepared.

Visitors to the College of Arms are sometimes shown a tatty old polythene bag. They are astonished when told that the cushion it contains is the one that the Queen sat on at her Coronation.

The Queen once tried to order a picnic basket from Peter Jones by telephone. The exercise would have been a failure had not the sceptical assistant who took her call thought to check with Buckingham Palace afterwards. A governessy member of the household tutted and muttered words to the effect that the Queen really ought to know better.

The Queen Mother used to enjoy dining at the Temple. And no wonder. The cellars are legendary and, of course, nothing but the very best was lavished on her. Nevertheless at the end of one dinner, when a priceless Chateau Yqem was offered, she startled her hosts by saying, ‘Do you know, I think just a few more glasses of the champagne we had to start with would do perfectly.’

When huffy, no-nonsense novelist Evelyn Waugh suddenly conceived a mania to meet the exquisitely floral Queen Mother, nobody could quite understand why. But a meeting was arranged in a flat somewhere and the hostess produced champagne. The Queen Mother was girlish and enchanting. ‘Oh, champagne,’ she exclaimed, waving her arms about, ‘what a treat!’ Evelyn Waugh remained stiffly immobile while his face assumed a look of uncompromising disbelief: ‘A treat, ma’am?’ It is not recorded how the encounter progressed after that.

In the 1950s the Queen Mother visited Sissinghurst for both lunch and tea. Afterwards a courtier reported that she had been charmed by the simplicity of the arrangements. Harold Nicolson was rather put out. ‘SIMPLE indeed! When I think of my Kümmel, the Moselle wine, and the truffles!’

During the last summer of her life, Princess Diana took frequent flights on a friends private jet and became friendly with the staff on board. On one occasion, as she entered the aircraft on a Friday having returned to London only four days before, she said breathlessly, ‘I’ve just managed to get the washing done in time.’ Diana was often observed by her friends doing her own ironing.

In her latter years, Princess Margaret, it is said by some, renounced the exclusive, high fashion ways of her youth. She became simple in her tastes. Kitty Kelley, the terrifying scourge of the Windsors, describes the sad spectacle of a cheap folding table propped up against a wall in the drawing room of Princess Margaret’s apartment, used, she was informed, for the Princess’s solitary TV dinners. Others claim to have seen her, of an afternoon, enjoying a leisurely mooch around Ikea on the North Circular Road.

Prices were never mentioned in any discussion between Norman Hartnell and the Queen Mother about her clothes. But on one occasion, he thought it wise to warn her that the osprey feathers she was contemplating cost £100 (and this was in 1960). She became rather still and her jaw jutted just a little. Then she said, ‘In that case, I’ll have another set in white.’

It emerges that the balcony at Clarence House is not equipped for Royal appearances. The Queen Mother used to wave from it on her birthday but she had to stand on an upturned flowerpot in order to be seen at all.

At the end of the war, Dame Jocelyn Woollcombe, Director of the Wrens, received the Queen, later Queen Mother, at her headquarters. The Queen disappeared into the ladies and re-emerged in a state of high excitement. ‘You must go and wash your hands,’ she said to her lady-in-waiting, ‘they’ve got Elizabeth Arden soap!’

At lunch at Kensington Palace (it was ‘an Indian’ in fact but presumably not ‘takeaway’) Princess Margaret banged on her poppadom and bits flew all over the room. Her polite guest was half-way out of his seat to pick them up, when she said, ‘Don’t do that.’ She indicated the butler. ‘That’s what he’s there for.’

The Queen Mother’s staff at Clarence House were treated in unconventional ways. A number of them had their own apartments in the building, the kitchens of which – because food was provided in the staff dining room – remained unused. A senior member of staff, however, one day found his kitchen mysteriously stocked up with jars of olives, tins of pate, boxes of fondant creams, Bendick’s mints and quantities of cheese footballs. He made inquiries and found that the trail led back to the Queen Mother herself. ‘I thought you might want to give a dinner party,’ she explained.

She was also ahead of her time in the matter of the home delivery of food. Years before ordinary people had fallen into the habit of telephoning to restaurants for dishes to be biked round, she would insist, if she heard that a member of her staff had been invited out to dinner, that the Clarence House kitchen should provide everything and that it should be conveyed to the party, with the guest, in a royal car.

The Queen Mother once confessed to a friend that she often had a small drink before going out in the evening. Indeed, often, she would have another, and then, equally often, she would have another one after that. ‘And, do you know,’ she said, ‘it doesn’t have any effect at all.’