My Husband and I

by Ingrid Seward

  There were occasions when his manner would soften. He believed in encouraging his children ‘to master at least one thing, because as soon as a child feels self-confidence in one area, it spills over into all others’. And Mabel Anderson publicly insisted: ‘He was a marvellous father. When the children were younger he always set aside time to read to them or help them put together those little model toys.’

  There were nonetheless moments when his exasperation got the upper hand. He tried to teach his son to sail, without noticeable success. Charles was often seasick and did not respond well to the hearty disciplines of life onboard. He later recalled: ‘I remember one disastrous day when we went racing and my father was, as usual, shouting. We wound the winch harder and the sail split in half with a sickening crack. Father was not pleased.’ The difference in their personalities opened a gulf between father and son. ‘I didn’t listen to advice from my father until I was in my late teens,’ Charles said.

  He was more at ease in the company of his grandmother, who now bore the title Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. As a mother herself, she had been warm and loving but frequently distracted. Being a grandmother, however, suited her and she brought more affection to the role than Queen Mary had ever been capable of. In her dying days, the old Queen unbent a little, allowing her great-grandson to play with her collection of jade objects, a pleasure she had sternly denied her granddaughters, Elizabeth and Margaret. But, despite the mellowing sadness of old age (she lived to see her husband and three of her sons die and another exiled), she never lost her intimidating air of haughty majesty, even with her own family.

  The Queen Mother, by contrast, was gentle and welcoming. She remembered her grandson as ‘a very gentle boy with a very kind heart, which I think is the essence of everything’. The feeling was reciprocated. On her eightieth birthday, Charles said: ‘Ever since I can remember, my grandmother has been the most wonderful example of fun, laughter, infinite security and, above all else, exquisite taste. For me, she has always been one of those extraordinarily rare people whose touch can turn everything into gold – whether it be putting people at their ease, turning something dull into something amusing, bringing happiness and comfort to people in her presence, or making any house she lives in a unique haven of cosiness and character.’

  Charles and Anne’s other grandmother was Philip’s mother, Princess Alice, who had now founded a nursing order of Greek Orthodox nuns and wore a nun’s habit (which did not inhibit her chain-smoking consumption of noxious untipped Greek cigarettes or strong, caffeine-loaded coffee or her taste for sherry). She made occasional visits to England from her retreat in Greece and took delight in Charles’s company, though he found her a rather alarming figure.

  ‘She was very severe,’ Eileen Parker remembered. ‘She always sat bolt upright and had an almost overpowering personality. The room filled with smoke when she was around.’ She spoke broken English in a thick, guttural accent and, because of her deafness, she was hard to make conversation with. ‘She had to be near you so that she could look at you and lip read what you were saying,’ Mrs Parker remembered. ‘The Queen Mother was completely different. Very natural; she had the gift of putting you at your ease and making you feel as if you were the only person in the room.’

  One thing Charles did share with his father was an interest in cooking and what went on in the palace kitchens and he was forever popping in to help the chefs weigh out the ingredients, fetching the pots, to give warning when the saucepans and kettles were coming to the boil. Not all his culinary efforts were successful, however. He was once sent to the palace storeroom by a chef named Aubrey – and dropped the tray loaded with butter, baking powder, two dozen eggs and sultanas on the floor on the way back. Not surprisingly, his presence did not always meet with the approval of the kitchen staff, who would complain that he got in the way.

  His attempts at making ice lollies were equally fraught. Mabel Anderson kept turning up the temperature of the nursery fridge because his sibling’s milk was getting too cold. Charles kept turning it down again because his lollies wouldn’t freeze. Whether it was the milk or the lollies that came out right depended on who had last been at the fridge.

  He enjoyed ballroom and Scottish dancing and was taught, as his mother had been, by Miss Vacani, who came to the palace to give him lessons with other children belonging to members of the household. But he found it difficult to mix and would cling to Nanny Lightbody and would watch as Anne ‘would go off with the other children’. And while Charles was often too shy to talk, ‘Anne talked non-stop’. When he was nervous, Mrs Parker noted, his mouth would twitch to one side in the manner later seized on by comic impersonators.

  It had quickly become apparent that Princess Anne was growing up very differently. She once observed that she should have been a boy or, as she says, she would have ‘probably been regarded as a tomboy’. There are those who are close to the royal family who believe that not only should she have been born a boy, but that she should also have been the eldest. Philip was one who held that view.

  Single-minded, sporty and brave, Anne is unimpressed by rank or title, is unafraid of controversy and cares little for the opinion of others. And if she can be disconcertingly ‘royal’ when the mood takes her (‘I’m not your “love”, I’m your Royal Highness,’ she once admonished an over-familiar photographer), she is someone who has no qualms or reservations about letting her hair down and mucking in when the occasion so demands. In other words, she is very much her father’s daughter – in a way that Charles could never be his father’s son.

  ‘He always had more fun with Anne,’ Eileen Parker observed. ‘Charles is more like the Queen, while Anne is very like Prince Philip.’ As Philip himself would later admit: ‘Perhaps I did spoil her at times.’

  ‘Anne would boss Charles; she would take command of things,’ recalled Mrs Parker. ‘If she saw a toy she wanted, she would grab it. She also grabbed everything that Charles wanted – and everything he had she wanted.’

  Charles had a blue pedal car he was particularly fond of. He was often unceremoniously bundled out of it by his more aggressive sister. It was the same with the tricycle they shared. If Charles was riding it, Anne was sure to want it. ‘There were terrible scenes,’ said Mrs Parker, who used to entertain the royal siblings at her home in Kensington’s Launceston Place. ‘Nanny Lightbody would say, “Now stop this!” ’

  There was no stopping Anne, however. When their father presented them each with a pair of boxing gloves and tried to instruct them in the art of self-defence, they set about each other with such fury that he had to take them away again.

  Once, when they were staying at Balmoral, Lady Adeane, the wife of the Queen’s private secretary, gave them a paper bag full of mushrooms she had just picked. A row quickly ensued over who was going to present them to their mother. They started tugging at the bag, which burst open, spilling its contents over the gravel drive – at which point Anne, who had just returned from a riding lesson, set about her brother with her riding crop. Charles burst into tears just as the Queen opened the door. In exasperation, she shouted: ‘Why can’t you behave yourselves!’ and boxed them both around the ears.

  As the princess admitted: ‘We fought like cats and dogs.’ And ‘no’ was not a word she readily responded to. ‘When she got really worked up, she would start throwing things at him,’ Mrs Parker said. ‘She was very strong-willed, a real menace.’

  She was forever ignoring her nanny’s instructions not to take too many toys out, but would instead empty the entire cupboard onto the floor and, in those days of coal fires in every room, make herself ‘filthy in the process’. If she didn’t get her way ‘she had the most frightful fit of temper, lying on the floor and kicking with sheer temper’.

  Charles was surprisingly nice to his boisterous little sister (‘perhaps too nice,’ Mrs Parker observed), always inviting her to join in his games, taking a concerned and conciliatory attitude towards her excesses. And for all their squab
bles, the two got on reasonably well together, as they had to. For, like their mother and her sister before them, Charles and Anne spent more of their infancy in the company of adults – servants, courtiers, family members – than they did with children of their own age and it was to each other that they turned for playful companionship. That happened to suit Charles, who did not mix easily.

  But if Anne was more than her brother’s equal, it was Charles who commanded the greatest attention, no matter what their father might have thought about his abilities. He was born to be king and that fact was subtly drummed into him and his sister from their earliest memory. By her own account, she ‘always accepted the role of being second in everything from quite an early age. You adopt that position as part of your experience. You start off in life very much a tail-end Charlie, at the back of the line.’ And however much she might kick and scream, there, by genetic accident and the law of primogeniture, she was destined to remain.

  She would be grateful for that in years to come. She developed a healthy view of her position in the royal hierarchy. ‘I’m the Queen’s daughter and as a daughter I get less involved than the boys,’ she said. That allowed her to develop her own interests, in her own way, without the pressures of a centre-stage royal role that so inhibited Charles. ‘I’m me, I’m a person, I’m an individual, and I think it’s better for everybody that I shouldn’t pretend to be anything that I’m not,’ she once remarked.

  There was no place for her, though, at the great occasion of the Coronation of her mother. She was too young to witness that pivotal transition not just from one reign to the next, but from one era to another. Anne, not quite three, remained at Buckingham Palace, suffering ‘the normal sisterly fury at being left behind’. There was a party for all the children in the Madame Vacani dancing class. They watched the ceremony on a flickering black-and-white television set.

  Anne’s memories of the day itself are inevitably vague. What she does remember was being taken out onto the balcony afterwards with the rest of the family and being told to ‘wave to the people’. It was a public lesson in the demands that came with being a princess. There was no escape from being royal. As she would later say, ‘The idea of opting out is a non-starter.’

  ‘The pattern of my life from birth until I went to boarding school, at the age of thirteen, was living in London during the week and at Windsor at the weekends,’ she said. ‘The holidays were divided between Christmas and the New Year at Sandringham, Easter at Windsor and most of the summer holidays at Balmoral.’

  She settled into the time-honoured routine of country life. Schoolwork would occasionally intrude and, to help improve their French, a tutor, a certain Mlle de Roujoux, was employed. But football seemed to play as important part in the curriculum as irregular verbs. ‘The Queen is always goalkeeper and Prince Philip, Princess Margaret and the children join in,’ Mlle de Roujoux recalled. ‘Charles and Anne were real little devils and never stopped playing tricks on me. The last words they shouted at me as I left for the train back home were “Cafe au lait, au lit”, which I had taught them and which they had found most amusing. It means, “coffee with milk in bed”.’

  Anne has no complaints about the way she and Charles were treated as children, even though their parents were not around as much as they would have liked. She thrived in the freedom they had. While to modern eyes this distance looks odd, at the time it was nothing unusual – the fictional world of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five or Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons shows how often parents were relatively distant figures in children’s lives. Most wealthy parents left their children with nannies and governesses, and they seldom travelled with their children until the advent of cheap flights. ‘They were supportive and never really quibbled about what you wanted to do,’ Anne said. ‘There were occasional comments about was that really a good idea?’

  ‘We may not have been too demanding, in the sense we understood what the limitations were,’ she recalled recently. ‘But I don’t think that any of us for a second thought that she [the Queen] didn’t care for us in the same way as any other mother did. In the early fifties, when I was growing up, there were still lots of people working and living in the countryside. Information was passed from parents to children, knowledge was absorbed rather than taught. My “knowledge” of ponies, horses and riding was largely acquired that way, by absorption.’

  Interestingly, it was her father who really encouraged her riding. When he saw just how good she was – and how much better than her brother – he contacted Sir John Miller, the then head of the Royal Mews at Buckingham Palace and told him to ‘get on with it’. Charles was still at the end of a leading rein when Anne was off jumping and galloping before she had properly learned how to trot. Philip had no reservations about letting his daughter expose herself to the dangers inherent in equestrian sport. ‘It was almost as if he treated her as a son,’ one observer recalled.

  He also found the time to introduce his daughter to sailing on the waters of Loch Muick near Balmoral, with considerably more success than he’d had with Charles, and Anne soon became a proficient yachtswoman, as she still is today.

  He would also take the children camping on the windblown Highland hills. They would cook over a fire and spend the night in sleeping bags in a bothy built in Victoria’s day as a picnic hut. Again, it was Anne rather than her altogether more delicate brother who derived the greater pleasure from these Spartan escapades. But that, given their physical differences, was inevitable. Charles was a poor athlete; Anne became a first-class tennis and lacrosse player and, most notably, an Olympic three-day event rider.

  The contrast was reflected in their relationships with their parents. Charles gravitated to his mother, who provided him with a sympathetic ear; Anne was close to Philip. Charles sometimes gave the impression of being ‘terrified’ of his father, who had little understanding of his son’s fears and inhibitions and was inclined to laugh at them. He laughed at Anne too, but she could deal with that, cheerfully braving his ridicule, saying anything she wanted to him, and laughing back at him and with him, as she did when they were playing a game involving car number plates.

  To keep his children amused on long car journeys, Philip would call out the registrations of passing vehicles and ask them to make a sentence out of the letters. One car had the number plate ‘PMD’.

  ‘That’s easy,’ Anne said. “Philip’s my dad!” ’

  She paints her childhood as an enviable outdoor 1950s lifestyle, surrounded by family and animals. ‘We grew up singing on the way to and from barbecues,’ she recalls. ‘Mostly First World War songs – we have quite a repertoire of those. The Queen is a very competent singer. I think we were very lucky as a family to be able to do so much together. We all appreciated that time.’

  The question of education is always an important one for parents, and the Queen and Prince Philip were no different in that compared to anyone else, though their options were obviously constrained by convention and issues of security, as they looked to do what they felt was best for their children. With Charles, because his shyness carried through into his studies, the Queen understood that he was likely to get more embarrassment than encouragement from working as one of a group (looking back today, he is certain that her assessment was right), and she consequently decided that he should have lessons alone when he began his education.

  Miss Catherine Peebles, who was promptly named Mispy (from Miss P), set up a schoolroom at Buckingham Palace, but instead of inviting other children to join him in his studies, he was taught on his own. Even Anne was not allowed in when he was working. Miss Peebles discovered that she had to deal with a vague child or, perhaps more accurately, a child who still had only a vague relationship to the external world. He was a ‘plodder’ who was good at art but took rather a long time learning to read, found it hard to concentrate on written subjects, and was incapable of understanding the ‘language’ of mathematics.

  Like his mother before him, Charles was taken on
educational visits to the museums and, of greater interest, to Madame Tussaud’s waxworks, where he gazed at the effigies of the parents he saw less of than he would have wished. To ensure that these outings went off with the minimum of disruption, the Queen’s press secretary, the later knighted Richard Colville, sent a letter to the editors of the Fleet Street newspapers asking them to allow him to enjoy himself without the embarrassment of constant publicity.

  It was a vain appeal. Attitudes towards the royal family had changed since the days when his mother could go for open carriage rides around London waving politely to the people. In the still ordered society of the 1930s, royalty was treated with respectful deference. Twenty years later, public interest in this grand family had sharpened. Royal watching was becoming a national sport. The popular newspapers had started pandering to their readers’ interests and wanted to provide them with as much coverage as they could – though by today’s standards, they were still very restrained.

  However, the Queen and Prince Philip were determined to give Charles as normal a childhood as they could, and in a break from royal tradition decided to abandon the system of private tutoring. In 1955, the Palace announced that he would be going to Hill House, a pre-prep school five minutes’ drive from Buckingham Palace in Knightsbridge. This, they believed, was the best way to equip him for his future role, and the Queen was encouraged wholeheartedly by her husband. When he went there for the first time, an army of photographers and reporters descended.

  ‘The Queen and I want Charles to go to school with other boys of his generation and learn to live with other children, and to absorb from childhood the discipline imposed by education with others,’ Philip explained. The academic side was deemed to be of secondary importance, as he told his son: ‘Look, I’m only going to bother if you’re permanently bottom. I really couldn’t care less where you are. Just stay in the middle, that’s all I ask.’