by Karen Harper
Queen Mary and the king had attended Chad’s funeral. Also, they sent me a condolence note, so I guess they knew how much Chad had meant to me, though I never told them we had hoped to wed. My parents said I should come home for a visit, but this was home to me now.
Besides, it was more shocking deaths that made me go to the Big House to take Johnnie back again, for in that same July of 1918, word came that the tsar and all his family had been slaughtered by Bolshevik revolutionaries in some dreadful cellar in the dark of night.
“Everyone here is crying,” Johnnie said, when Mabel brought him down to me with his little satchel. “I guess it’s for Chad and Peep George going away. Grannie knows they went away.”
I could tell Mabel had been crying too. I was not sure that I’d ever get over Chad’s loss, but to think of the tsar’s children, so full of life, those lovely, sweet girls—oh, but Margaretta would be devastated. She’d actually been able to exchange some letters with the girls during the first months of their exile. And I had a feeling she would never quite get over their fates. “I will explain to Johnnie,” I told Mabel, and we hugged each other.
“I overheard,” she whispered, “that the king blames himself for not taking them in, but that’s to remain private. He and the queen are going to the London memorial service for the tsar, though the prime minister advises against it. So much loss . . .”
“I hope no one is mad at me for anything,” Johnnie told me as he carried his satchel and we started out for York Cottage, where Victor was waiting for me with a carriage, the same one in which Chad had driven us to see Wood Farm for the first time. I needed the walk to steel myself to explain things to Johnnie as best I could, to find the words not only about losing Chad but those beloved girls in cloud dresses. We walked a ways and sat on the bench at the edge of the lake where Chad and I had sat, once angry with each other, while Johnnie threw stones in the water. Today, as if he sensed something, he did not speak or jump around, but looked up at the sky, a habit he’d never lost.
“I want you to know,” I told him, “that Chad did not want to leave us and did not want to leave Sandringham.”
“Where is he then? Out by Cat’s Bottom or in the woods? Penny said he’s gone and that’s all she was supposed to say to me, but she was pretty sad.”
“You know that people die sometimes.”
“Grandpapa died. Grannie said so and said did I remember him.”
“And do you?”
“Did he put butter on his pant legs, Lala?”
I smiled. “Yes, to make you laugh. He liked to make you happy, and I do too.”
“Did he know about my falling fits?”
“No, he died before that. Johnnie, Chad fell down in the ravine and hit his head and died, but he didn’t want to leave us. He went to heaven now, far, far up there, somewhere, but his body is buried—like we buried Peep George—in the ground. But we’ll always remember him here with us, won’t we?”
“I will and bet I can find him somewhere in the woods or by the Wash where he showed us birds that fly.”
I sighed, but his not really grasping all this was for the best. Should I even tell him about his girls in cloud dresses? No, that was beyond his understanding, and, frankly, beyond mine.
“Grannie said you were sick but you’d be better soon,” Johnnie said, putting his hand in mine. “You still look a little sick.”
I forced a smile and sniffed back tears, when I thought I’d cried out all that I would ever have. To each his or her own way of grieving for those we love and those we lose, and God help us if that is the same person.
“And, Nanny Lala, I have a present for you,” he announced and opened his satchel to dig out a folded piece of paper. “To make you feel better, make you well, ’cause you taught me to write and lots of things.”
I opened the note. In pencil, in his best handwriting, though a bit on the slant, with the paper giving off the sweet lilac scent his grandmother often wore, I read, NANNY—I LOVE YOU. JOHNNIE.
THAT NOTE AND that child kept me going, though his seizures were increasing in frequency and length. I treasured the visits from his grandmother and sometimes his mother, who loved him dearly and visited when she could. Penny came often too, to play with Johnnie, but it lifted my heart to see her getting on without her father. She lived with her aunt and two cousins, but we saw a great deal of her.
And through Penny as well as his grandmother, Johnnie played with many of the local lads, openly and easily, in a way David and Bertie never had. Johnnie was not lonely as they had been—as I still was for Chad. It pained me that I imagined him everywhere we went on the estate and hurt me too when Johnnie sometimes insisted he was looking for Chad. And when he stared up at the clouds and mentioned the pretty girls in cloud dresses . . .
I tried to buck myself up, despite wind and snow, that January 18, 1919. The Armistice bringing Europe peace, the Treaty of Versailles, was to be signed that day in France, though that would bring no Sandringham boys home. I almost snapped at Johnnie for playing his favorite record of American war songs repeatedly that day: “Over There” with Enrico Caruso and “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again,” because his name was in that song. How that reminded me of one of our last days together—as a family with Chad and me. Today my boy had been marching about and here we were cooped up, and I could have screamed.
“Johnnie, can we turn that off for now, or change the record?” I asked in my best I-mean-it nanny voice.
“I can put on ‘I’m Always Chasing Rainbows,’” he told me. “I like the words, watching clouds drifting by. Lala, are you still sick?”
Just heartsick, I thought, but I said, “I’m fine. If you’re fine, I’m fine.”
“Oh, I am,” he said, but he lifted the needle from the record and came over and sat next to me on the sofa. “Lala,” he said, so seriously, “the music has stopped.”
I nodded and took his hand. After these fourteen years we’d been together, once again he was trying to comfort me. I tried to look only at the bright side of things: I regretted nothing but, of course, Chad’s loss—Johnnie’s banishment from his family home and David’s increasingly reckless behavior over the years.
“We are going to dance!” Johnnie declared, jumping up to put the music back on. It was another of his favorites, “After the Ball.”
“This is about a game bouncing a ball,” he told me as he pulled me to my feet, held my hands, and bounced around the room, pulling me after him.
Many a heart is aching . . . Many the hopes . . . vanished . . . The words on the record echoed in my heart.
I didn’t tell him it wasn’t about a game, not that kind of ball. I never told him that I was going to go on even if I sometimes felt my life was over, but for him. Because right then, his eyes rolled back into his head, and he collapsed, and I screamed for Cook and Victor and we managed to get him upstairs before the worst of the seizure began.
“You can leave us now,” I told them as I scrambled for his mouthpiece and his pillow. “Just another one. He’ll be better in the morning. Thank you both for being so loyal. Close his door, please.”
I was grateful he was in his own bed. The seizure was worse than usual, but when it ended, I managed to get some water with his bromide powder down him. At least Their Majesties had agreed that we should forgo the more brutal cures, and I wasn’t even sure this helped.
Johnnie wasn’t a bit chatty afterward as he often was. He just whispered, “I’ll find Chad. Don’t worry, Lala,” and fell into an exhausted sleep.
I sat by his chair, nodding off now and then as he slept, wishing my world was like his, that I had hopes of finding Chad and could see girls in cloud dresses in the sky.
Then, in the early evening, I jolted alert and realized my boy wasn’t breathing. I jumped up, bent close over him, tried to shake him awake.
“Johnnie. Johnnie!”
I felt for his neck pulse, his wrist pulse. Nothing. No. No! But he felt cold, his eyes closed in sleep. L
imp, unconscious, that was surely all. It had been a more violent seizure than the others, but he always woke up—he must talk to me again! He’d said he’d find Chad!
And perhaps he had.
I TELEPHONED THE queen, and she and the king motored to us straightaway from London. She came up to his bedroom where he lay, pale as a ghost on the bed.
“My dear boy,” she said, bending to take his limp hand. “And my dear Lala.” I had tried to stay strong to console her, but she embraced and comforted me. “Perhaps the Lord wanted to care for him now, despite the fine job you have done,” she told me.
It was only then I noticed the king had not come up, though I’d seen him get out of the motorcar and had heard his voice downstairs. “Does His Majesty wish time alone with—”
“He can’t bear to see him . . . like this. He wants to remember him handing him stamps off the floor and jumping about when he was supposed to be quiet, that’s all.”
“Yes,” I said, blotting at my tears that had dropped on the shoulder of her coat, “that’s all.”
ON JANUARY 21, 1919, we buried Johnnie in the Sandringham churchyard where Chad lay. I had his NANNY—I LOVE YOU note and the Fabergé grouse stuck in my muff and I held tight to them the entire church service and burial. Bertie and David were still away, but Mary stuck tight to her mother, Harry to the king, and dear George to me. But after everything, it was frail, old Queen Alexandra and I who lingered longest at the fresh grave, despite the bitter cold.
“Should I return the grouse statue, ma’am?” I asked her.
“You keep it, my dear. And you come here to live in the Big House with your friend Mabel until you are ready to . . . to get on with your life. I hear Mabel might go with you, and I will miss her too. Missing people we love—it is still better to have loved and lost than not to have loved, as they say, isn’t it?”
“Yes, ma’am. Thank you for reminding me of that. So many losses here, but love means we wouldn’t want to blot the memories out, even if they hurt.”
“Precisely. My sister says the same, and she’s lost her son, his wife, and those lovely Russian children to those black-hearted Bolsheviks! I know my memory is not as good as it once was, dear Lala, but I won’t forget our Johnnie. Now you’re trembling from the cold. I’d best get back in my motor and go home—and you too—to Wood Farm. But if it is too empty and awful, you come to me.”
Erect, beautiful, despite her feeble frame, she patted my arm and turned toward her waiting motorcar. I blinked back tears at the array of fresh flowers left to freeze on the grave and hurried to take her arm so she wouldn’t slip. I wanted to stay here at Sandringham, near Johnnie, near my beloved Chad forever, but they would both want me to go on—go on and keep looking up.
Chapter 36
April 6, 1959
The Sandringham Estate
Lala, dear,” the Duke of Windsor cried as he entered my flat. He looked as boyish as ever, though he was nearly sixty-five. I still saw the child in him, jumpy, unsure, trying ever so hard to please and charm—and cling.
“Sir, how wonderful to see you and how good you look,” I told him. I bobbed him the slightest of curtsies. At least my temptation to box his ears for letting us all down had passed.
“Now, don’t you ‘sir’ me. I won’t have it,” he insisted as he gave me a quick hug and stepped in past me, then flourished the big bouquet of pink roses I had seen he was trying to hide behind his back. Never had that boy been able to hide anything from me, though, Lord knows, he tried.
“Oh, how lovely and thoughtful,” I told him, inhaling their scent. I closed the door, and we went into the living room. “I’ll put them in water straightaway.” He sat where he’d been twice before in my comfy chair while I popped the roses into my only large vase and ran some water from the tap in my kitchenette. I hurried back in to put the roses on the telly. I caught him staring, almost glaring, at my large framed and tinted picture of Johnnie, but he looked back to me with a beaming smile.
“I hope the duchess is well,” I told him, sitting on the chintz sofa directly across from him.
“Hearty and happy. But to business. Despite your silver hair, you still look like the Lala who saved us all—ha!”
“Ha, is right. I’m eighty-four, my boy.”
“My boy—I’ll always be that to you, won’t I? But for Mary and Harry, I’m the last left of your brood of the six of us and the last of all the royals you knew when you were in service with us.” He heaved a huge sigh. “But here’s my task at hand. I’m writing a second memoir, things I didn’t get to in The King’s Story, which did quite well by the way, especially in America. This one’s to be titled A Family Album. It will have some photos—of you too, that one with the nursemaids where Bertie and I are in the sailor suits Father insisted on.”
“Did he ever! And shouted at me to sew up your pockets when you put your hands in them. Anyone who slouched or didn’t dress proper he called a cad, and we couldn’t have that with his two oldest boys, and you the heir.”
As he slowly shook his head, creases furrowed his brow. He fussed with his collar and tie. “Shouted at everyone, didn’t he? But my grandparents and you were my refuge.”
We were silent a moment as the bad times as well as the good seemed to hover in the room. He fidgeted, pulled out a gold cigarette case, then slid it back into his pocket as if I’d scold him if he smoked here. I spoke to break the tense silence.
“I thought your first book was masterful, sir—David. Even Mr. Hansell and Mademoiselle Bricka would have been pleased. You have a way with words. May I fetch you some tea before we reminisce?”
“Thanks, but I’m okay. I’ve taken to American coffee.”
“And speech. Then ask away for your book.”
From his suit coat pocket, he took a small pad of paper and unscrewed a gold fountain pen. “Lala, you’d never consider writing a book, would you? I daresay, you’ve seen a lot of us from the inside out.”
“Me? Hardly. A retired and tired nanny. Absolutely not. My correspondence with your mother after I left service was as far as my writing talents go.”
He looked relieved. I could still read him after all this time. Something else was coming. His expression was half pout, half fear. How tragic that he and Bertie were so abused in the beginning and that I couldn’t quite love that out of them the way I had protected Johnnie.
“You did give back all my letters to Special Branch when they asked for them during the first war, didn’t you?” he asked, trying to sound nonchalant. “I mean, if you had kept any of them, I’d like to give them a glance to see if they’d be of any use for the new book. I don’t want others scaring things up, misrepresenting me, foibles and all.”
“David,” I said, leveling a stern look at him but resisting the temptation to shake my finger, “you asked me that once before.” In a stern voice, I told him, “Special Branch sent an agent to ask that I hand them over, and I complied.”
“Well, then,” he said, slapping his knee, “on to A Family Album. Any memories of when you first came to Sandringham?”
As we talked, the only thing I mentioned of his childhood nightmare was that his nurse when I arrived used to make him cry so she could have him all to herself. He frowned and nodded. No doubt he had buried deep those dreadful days.
“Yes,” he said, scribbling fast with his pad perched on his knee. “The third nanny was the charm, eh? Someone told me that the first one got sacked for calling my maternal grandmother fat. Well, everyone called her ‘Fat Mary’ behind her back, and she was.” He looked up at me. “The duchess and I watch our weight. She has a throw pillow that says, ‘You can never be too rich or too thin,’ and she means it, never lets me overeat. She runs a tight ship, and I love her for it, gives me a good whack now and again. Good thing I had strict naval training before she became my captain—eh?”
He forced a laugh, and I smiled, but the biggest puzzle of David’s adult life hit me hard. He had always been attracted to women who resemble
d the worst person he had ever known—not counting Adolf Hitler, of course. Wallis Simpson even physically resembled the woman who had been so cruel to him. Terrible that the poor boy had married Wallis, forsaking his heritage and kingdom for her! Worse, that, even in physical resemblance, I swear, he had sought out women who reminded him of that sadistic Mary Peters—and then, more or less, had married one of them.
He looked up at me. “I’ve tried not to lord it over others because of being born with a silver spoon in my mouth, Lala, one, I daresay, I’ve managed to tarnish now and again, though I did dearly care for my people, those down and out especially.”
But for your own little brother, I thought, but I said only, “I know you tried, David.” I was pleased he could be so insightful, but rather than pursue that, off we went again, sailing through memories, some good, some bad. Despite what he’d said about not lording it over others, he clung to the idea he was special. As firstborn son, the golden boy, the internationally charming and adored Prince of Wales, of course, he had been. But he was never strong enough to overcome. Bertie eventually did. Mary, Harry, and George coped. Even my dear Johnnie, bless his soul, did in his own way. But not the heir.
“I won’t hide Johnnie in this book, like they tried to do,” he promised, putting pen and paper away. “Full disclosure in these modern times.” When he rose, I stood to show him out. He seemed in a hurry now, glancing at his watch, probably needing to report on time to his wife, just as he used to do to his father. “Yet I am always surprised to see you still have him here,” he went on, in lecture mode now, gesturing at the portrait, “reminding you of the tragedy. You should put up that feather picture from Chad over the hearth instead.”
“It’s in a place of honor in my bedroom.”
“At least I see you have a photo of the rest of us too on the mantel.”
I did indeed, but it was normal-sized, not life-sized like the framed one with Johnnie as a baby all decked out—from his layers of muslin, cambric, and lace to his white stockings and buttoned shoes. I’m sure it would have pleased David mightily if I’d taken it down while he was here, but Johnnie wasn’t going anywhere, not from over my mantel and not from the memories of my years with the royal Yorks, the Waleses, the Windsors, my own family album.