by Wendy Holden
“What’s he doing here?” asked Lilibet.
“Coming to get his orders from you!” teased Margaret. “Second Subaltern Elizabeth Windsor.”
“We have a m-meeting later,” the king said evasively. “But at the moment, Eisenhower’s being shown round the c-c-castle. If he comes round the corner, he’ll see us.”
“Would that be so bad?” asked Margaret, rather longingly. Eisenhower, often pictured in the newspapers with his sunny beam, was famously tall and debonair.
“Yes, because we’re up here and he’ll be down there,” her mother pointed out. “We’ll have to shout and it’ll be terribly embarrassing.”
Lilibet had grasped the problem. Her uniform seemed to have conferred on her a new decisiveness. As her parents dithered, she took charge. “There’s only one thing for it,” she hissed, as the American voices got louder and closer. “Everyone under the tablecloth!”
And so it was, that when the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe emerged into the rose garden, his hosts were nowhere to be seen.
“Come and see the Maiden’s Blush, General.” The voice of Lord Wigram floated up from below.
“Stop it!” Lilibet hissed to her sister, who was shaking with suppressed laughter. “He’ll see the table moving!”
“Madame Hardy and Mrs. Finch are also having a wonderful year.”
“I sure am glad to hear that,” came the general’s warm Kansas voice. He sounded amused.
“And Queen Elizabeth is quite magnificent.”
“The most dangerous rose in Europe,” quipped Eisenhower, as the flower’s real-life counterpart suppressed a snort.
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 w
as 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.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
The roar from outside burst through the open glass doors. Marion looked at the familiar row of figures on the balcony, backs toward her. The king looked frail but relieved in his admiral’s uniform with its heavy gold cuffs. Lilibet was wildly proud in her ATS khaki, buckle and buttons blazing. Beside them, the queen in one of her trademark big hats, curved brim thrusting triumphantly upward, waved at the carpet of people below. Margaret, in her frilly collar, looked like the demure schoolgirl she most certainly was not.
And in the middle of them all, a short, round figure in a wonky bow tie and watch chain. When he looked to the side, to catch something the king had said, Marion saw that tears were pouring unashamedly down Churchill’s jowly face.
They were pouring down hers too. No one had said anything, but it was surely unlikely that Lilibet would hang up the ATS uniform of which she was so proud and file meekly back into the schoolroom. Margaret, meanwhile, had been restless and inattentive for months. And now she was standing on a balcony looking at a cheering crowd surging round the palace and stretching down the Mall. A boiling sea of ecstatic people yelling, singing and waving flags. How could she return to algebra after this?
Marion turned back into the room. The magnificent gilt-framed mirrors reflected a scene of genteel devastation. Not bombs now, but champagne glasses. Gathered on the tables, along the mantelpieces and everywhere else those recently assembled had stood. She spotted Margaret’s abandoned handbag and went toward it. But someone else got there first, someone slight and delicate-featured in an RAF uniform. “Leave it with me,” he said. “I’ll give it to her.”
She watched him move to the balcony door. He stood there directly behind the younger princess, who seemed to sense him immediately. She turned and smiled dazzlingly. As he handed over the bag, their fingers touched, not briefly, but lingeringly.
It happened so fast Marion wondered if she had imagined it. But the princess’s glowing face, as she looked at Townsend, left her in no doubt. Something was afoot.
The festivities within the palace went on long after the balcony appearances. At one stage the king, queen and princesses were leading a conga line through the state apartments. Well-bred shouts of excitement rose into the gilded molding, while the stamping gently clinked the chandeliers. Tommy was there looking ill at ease and holding gingerly on to the queen, while Peter Townsend happily clasped Margaret. Footmen in war-issue battle dress looked on, clearly longing to join in, but not, even in this moment of national unity, quite daring to.
Huge violet eyes, fringed with impossibly long lashes, gazed excitedly into hers, suddenly. Delicate fingers plucked at her sleeve. Margaret’s voice was jerky with delight. “Crawfie! What do you think?”
“What?”
“Papa is to let us out tonight.”
“Us?”
“Lilibet and I.”
“Out? You mean . . . outside the palace?”
The vivid little face nodded. “Exactly. Properly out, into the crowds. To celebrate with everyone else.”
“How exciting!” Marion felt thrilled too. “What time are we going?”
Margaret’s smile vanished. “Not you, Crawfie. Just us. Oh, and a couple of equerries.”
She could guess exactly which ones, Marion thought, as Margaret danced off in the conga. She stood there, full of an agitation that was a mixture of hurt and genuine fear. How could Margaret speak to her that way? Would the girls be safe in the great victory crowd? With a very married man who had his eye on Margaret?
It occurred to her that perhaps it was not even true, that permission had not been granted. Margaret was more than capable of inventing it, taking advantage of the situation and having others take the blame afterward. She would make sure, Marion decided.
She watched for the king and eventually spotted him, looking somewhat incongruous in the conga line. She hurried alongside. “Your Majesty. Margaret tells me she and Lilibet are going out this evening . . .”
The king was coughing with the effort, which seemed a strain on his lungs. He nodded, eyes streaming, as he fought for breath. “Poor darlings,” he conceded. “They’ve never had any fun yet.” Then off he went.
Marion thought of all the things she and the girls had done together over the years. Had none of that been fun? She sat down on a chair in the corridor. The dancers continued past her, wild with joy.
Later, alone, she went out into the crowds herself. It seemed as if the whole world was rejoicing. She watched, as if through a thick glass pane, as soldiers, sailors, ATS and Wrens—anyone in uniform—were hugged and mobbed by grateful people in civvies.
“Roll out the barrel!” everyone yelled. The noise was earsplitting. It seemed that the whole of London was roaring, screaming and shouting its euphoria. People were laughing and crying. Perfect strangers were kissing and hugging. Years of darkness, privation, terror and sorrow had given way to a mighty mass expression of hysterical relief. For everyone but Marion, it seemed. She felt hollow inside, dull, out of step with the mood.
She dodged several vigorous Hokey Cokeys and a good number of Lambeth Walks until, by the lions in Trafalgar Square, a young man was shoved against her by a surge in the crowd. “So sorry,” he yelled over the noise.
She shrugged; there was no need to apologize.
“Come for a drink?”
She hesitated, then nodded. A drink might help. Give her some artificial cheer at least. Feeling so unhappy amid all this ecstasy was like being a creature from another planet.
He grabbed her arm. She allowed herself to be pulled through the sea of people. “I don’t even know your name!”
“George!” he shouted over his shoulder. “Major George Buthlay, at your service!”
In the pub it was crowded and almost too hot to breathe. The noise of drunken people was deafening. A pub piano was pounding out flat notes. The group nearest them was singing so loudly it was impossible to hear any conversation.
That he was a major was impressive. “Where’s your uniform?” she yelled. His reply was hard to hear. It sounded as if he had served in the Middle East but the unit had been disbanded early. She was ready with another question. “Where do you live?”
“The silver city with the golden sands.”
She looked at him quizzically.
“Aberdeen.”
Her eyes widened. So he was a Scot, too. Amid the noise, it hadn’t been possible to distinguish. “I’ve never heard it called that before.”
He grinned. “Why should you? You’re a Sassenach.”
“I’m Scottish!” Marion gasped indignantly.
“Really?” The dark eyes had a mocking look. “You don’t sound it. What’s your name?” His brash manner should have annoyed h
er, but it didn’t. Not tonight, when all normal behavior was suspended.
She pretended not to hear. Where did he work?
“In a bank,” he shouted. “How about you?”
“I’m a teacher,” she yelled.
He looked her up and down. “I’ll teach you something.” He turned her toward him and kissed her deeply.
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
That Christmas, Alah died and was buried in the Hertfordshire village where she was born. Marion, attending the funeral of her old adversary, was struck by the paucity of the congregation. The church’s sixteenth-century interior echoed to a few old ladies’ reedy voices. None of the family the deceased had served so loyally had come to see her off in person. A card from the queen and a wreath of violets seemed a feeble gesture after a lifetime of such utter devotion. Marion shivered. Was this what awaited her too? Should she leave? She had George now, after all.
They had not, as she had expected, dissolved separately into the crowds after the VE night encounter. There had been many other similar encounters since. And in between he had taken her out, often to concerts. For someone so obviously bold and apparently rough, he had unexpectedly sensitive tastes in music.
From the arena of the Albert Hall, she had stared up in awe. The size of the place was amazing; the tiered balconies, the arches, the sloped seating, the vast curved stage. Then the concert began and she was lost in the music—Elgar—and full of a sweet, sad mystery. It pulled at her and made her yearn. In the second half it was Rachmaninov: great crashes and sweeps which sent her heart soaring. It all helped her feel she was in love, dizzyingly and dazzlingly so.
“I want to leave,” she said to George. It had taken some time to admit who her employers were. But he had taken it entirely in his stride, which made her love him all the more.
He looked nonplussed. “But the second half’s only just started.”
She laughed. “Not Rachmaninov! The royal family!”