MAY 1945: VERY NEARLY EIGHT years since Papa’s Coronation on 12 May 1937. The world had turned upside down. Uncle David had not been heard of – certainly not spoken of – for years. Uncle Edward was dead. So many, many people were dead! And for the whole conflict, they had been in Windsor, and when they left it, she and Margaret Rose, they would leave behind their innocent childhoods.
While they were dressing that Sunday at Royal Lodge, 6 May, and getting ready for church, the phone went. At any moment, the war in Europe was going to be over. Margaret and Lilibet piled into the car with Mummie and Papa and roared back to London. On 8 May, when Victory in Europe Day began, the Palace was surrounded by surging crowds, roaring and shouting and cheering.
When they had watched the terrible newsreels all through the war, they had become so used to unhappy crowds – to the frenzied, hypnotized Germans, Heil Hitlering. As Mummie used to say, one would feel an absolute Charlie addressing a British politician in that way – Hail Joynson-Hicks, for example. And just as bad, one thought of all the countless tiers of Soviet troops, like automata, paraded before ‘Uncle Joe’. (‘No Uncle of mine,’ Papa used to say. ‘He murdered my cousins.’) And, more lately, they had seen the burning cities, the refugees in their hundreds and thousands streaming from ruins, and pouring down roads where every tree was scorched to charcoal and every church was a smoking wreck.
And having seen so many horrible such spectacles on their newsreel screens in the cinema at Windsor Castle, they were now in the capital, and they could hear the voices soaring up from the Mall – ‘WE WANT THE KING! WE WANT THE KING!’
It went on all through the day. Eventually, Mummie told the King that they must go out on the balcony, with Lilibet and Margaret. When they did so, the noise was like a huge ocean roar. Later in the day, Mr Churchill had come to lunch at the Palace, and afterwards, he had gone out onto the balcony with them and given his famous V for Victory sign. More roars. And then Margaret had said, ‘I think we should go out in the crowd.’
And then Margaret had said, ‘I think we should go out in the crowd.’
Lilibet had thought her sister had gone mad, but Papa had surprised her by saying, ‘You know, you are right. What do you think, Tommy?’
And Sir Alan Lascelles, the King’s Private Secretary – Tommy – had said, ‘So long as they have a guard . . .’
So, it was arranged. A police sergeant would go with them, and a small party of their Grenadier Guards friends. They slipped out of the side gate in Buckingham Palace Road and walked down to Parliament Square. Then they went to their old childhood stamping ground in Piccadilly, down St James’s Street, Bennet Street, across Berkeley Square and Park Lane. They had gone into the Dorchester – the only place where Lilibet thought they had (perhaps) been recognized. It was difficult to know, because everyone was greeting everyone else. There was the most extraordinary sense of collective happiness, euphoria, relief. Total strangers embraced, or at the very least greeted one another as friends. They did not appear to be drunk. There wasn’t enough drink for any but the very lucky to have overindulged.
Eventually, they had come across Green Park, and they pressed through the crowds to the railings of the Palace and joined in the chanting, WE WANT THE KING! WE WANT THE KING! And there was Papa on the balcony again. There was a connection between the King and the crowds. There could never be a connection like that between a politician and a crowd, however clever the politician had been at wowing them with speeches through microphones. This was something quite different. It was like knowing your family. It was a real bond, not just a feeling of admiration or attraction. It was it. It was what one had always known, since Bognor.
WE WANT THE KING! WE WANT THE KING!