CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

The Americans have all gone,” Susan wailed. After the departure of Lilibet from the classroom, this was another huge personal blow. “But we don’t know where.”

She soon found out. That night the king rousingly addressed the country. “Four years ago our Nation and Empire stood alone against an overwhelming enemy with our backs to the wall. Tested as never before in history, in God’s providence we survived the test. Now once more a supreme test has to be faced.”

Marion, sitting with the girls in the king’s office, watched him turn from the microphone with glittering eyes. The queen, as she rarely was, seemed similarly downcast. Great numbers of lives were at risk, and the responsibility clearly weighed heavily on the commanders.

“It’s D-Day,” Reg yelled the next day. “We’ve landed in France! The invasion has started! The war’s nearly over. We can go home!”

It wasn’t, though, and they couldn’t. Germany’s latest secret weapon was now unleashed: the terrifying pilotless bombs that came over in droves throughout the day, rasping their way across the sky before stopping suddenly and diving to earth. A month after D-Day nearly three thousand people had been killed and eight thousand detained in the hospital.

“Just what is a doodlebug?” asked Margaret. “A real one, I mean.”

“An insect found in the Mississippi,” supplied Susan, in whom the countryside had developed a passion for natural history. She was hoping to study it at university.

“But the Germans call it the Vergeltungswaffe Eins,” Reg said. “That means Revenge Weapon Number One. They’re twenty-five feet long and they can fly a preset distance of a hundred and forty miles.” For all its dark purpose, he found the engineering behind it fascinating.

According to Peter, he was a gifted mathematician as well as classicist. In the new world beyond the war that people were now starting to glimpse, there would be great opportunities for children like him and Susan. A new Education Act had recently been passed, in which children from humble homes received state aid from primary school right through university. The war, for all its horror, had sped up progress. It had opened doors that had previously been closed; not just for paupers, but princesses too.

Lilibet took her ATS duties profoundly seriously. Out all day at the Camberley depot, she returned to the palace in the evening to regale everyone about her day. “We had a talk about mechanics this afternoon.”

“How boring,” Margaret interrupted, savagely.

Lilibet, unruffled, cut a neat piece of cheese on toast. “Then we had a lecture on oil.”

“Oil?”

But then, suddenly, Margaret changed her tune.

“Please can we go and see Lilibet at Camberley?” she wheedled.

Marion looked at her, eyebrow raised. “Isn’t it . . . boring?”

“Yes, very,” was the lofty reply. “But I think she’d appreciate the encouragement, poor thing.”

It was meant to be an informal visit, but then the king and queen decided to come too. Lilibet arrived back in the evenings wide-eyed at the amount of preparation. “Spit, polish and panic,” she said. “Everyone shines up everything. I had no idea this was what happened when Mummy and Papa visit somewhere.”

“And me,” put in Margaret fiercely. “Don’t forget me.”

They drove out to the depot through glorious early-spring weather. Margaret, following her parents down the inspection line, snorted to see her sister saluting her. In the garage, Lilibet was at pains to show her family her grasp of engine maintenance. But Marion, watching Margaret, saw the younger girl’s eyes suddenly gleam.

“Lilibet! The compression!”

Her sister peered at the engine. “What about it?”

“It’s missing,” said Margaret, confidently.

Lilibet glanced at her parents, and the various officers accompanying them, before looking challengingly back at her sister. “And how would you know?”

Margaret cheekily poked one of her sister’s buttons. “Why shouldn’t I know?”

Back at Windsor, Marion went straight to the mews, where the royal cars were garaged. “Oh yes,” the chauffeur confirmed. “ ’Er Royal ’Ighness’s been positively ’aunting us lately. Been full o’ questions, she ’as.”

In September the second of Germany’s deadly secret weapons arrived: the V-2. Their impact was even more devastating. “A single rocket can cause a crater fifty feet wide and ten feet deep and demolish a whole street of houses,” Reg reported. When a V-2 demolished the Woolworths in New Cross, southeast London, Margaret was beside herself with fury.

But the tide had definitely turned. Now the “dimout” replaced the blackout. The Russians surrounded Berlin. The horrors of Belsen and Buchenwald flooded the newspapers, which Marion did her best to hide from Margaret and Ivy from her pupils.

And now, finally, the evacuees returned home. As Lilibet was at Camberley, Margaret and Marion came to see them off.

The small group stood on Windsor station platform. Beside them, the London-bound train snorted and steamed like an impatient horse. Carriage doors slammed. People hurried up and down. The smaller children chattered and squealed with excitement about going home, about seeing their parents again.

But around Reg, Susan and Margaret, an awkward silence hung. A similar one hung about Ivy and Marion. Ivy was not leaving with her charges. She was moving to Eton to be with Peter, which should, Marion knew, have been a source of happiness. They would be able to see more of each other.

And yet a tight, tense feeling seized her these days whenever she saw her old friend. Ivy rarely resisted the opportunity to urge her to leave royal service, especially now the war was coming to an end. “You should escape, Maz! Find a man! A life! Have kids!”

Ivy didn’t understand, Marion thought. She had a life and kids, even if they weren’t her own. As for a man, she had finished with them.

Margaret was the first to break the platform’s silence. “Goodbye, then,” she said politely, extending her hand to Reg for it to be shaken.

Reg, in a red jersey, a cardboard suitcase in his hand, looked surprised. He had been accustomed to hugging his friend. Then understanding dawned. The war was nearly over. The social order was about to be restored. Margaret was a princess. Reg’s face fell, as if he had been somehow betrayed.

A whistle blew. The London-bound children clambered aboard. “Ta-ra!” called Ivy. “Give my love to Bermondsey!”

From the doorway Reg hung back. “We had fun,” he said to Margaret.

There was a strangled sound from Margaret. Tears were streaming down her face. Reg scrambled down again and the boy and girl hugged hard. They were parted by the stationmaster blowing his whistle. Seconds later the doors had slammed and the locomotive was wheezing out, hands waving wildly from the window.

President Roosevelt’s sudden death in April 1945 came before the news of Mussolini’s murder and Hitler’s suicide. “Hitler and Mussolini, in forty-eight hours,” Tommy remarked. “Not a bad right and left.”

And then, after a night of thunder and lightning, on a beautiful Sunday morning in early May, the phone rang in the private apartments at Windsor Castle. The king and queen, about to leave for church, found themselves summoned back to London, and the princesses with them. It was all over. Like the sudden blowing away of a storm, the atmosphere lightened. After years of gloom, the sun came out.