Читать книгу Behind Palace Doors - My Service as the Queen Mother's Equerry - Colin Burgess - Страница 10

The Queen Mother was an enigma. No other woman in Europe has been so feared and so loved. During World War II, she was asked if she would remove her two young daughters from London during the Blitz. Her reply was brutal, to the point and has gone down in history; she said: ‘The girls will not leave unless I do. I will not leave unless the King does. And the King will never leave.’

This act of supreme defiance caused Hitler to brand her the most dangerous woman in Europe and a year later German planes flew down the Mall and bombed Buckingham Palace while the King and Queen were there, prompting her – again famously – to comment: ‘At least now I can look the people of the East End of London in the face.’ It was this defiant and invulnerable streak that made you feel that if you were standing with the Queen Mother and she approved of something you did, you were bulletproof. A typical example of this came at Clarence House during a lunch party. I would sometimes go rollerblading round the park and I was told off by a general at the party for doing this. He said to me, ‘I don’t think it’s very appropriate for a Guards officer to be rollerblading.’

What could I say? This man was senior in rank to me so I had to respect his authority and couldn’t really tell him where to go. I started spluttering a bit, not really knowing what to do, but the Queen Mother had obviously overheard the whole conversation and she came straight over and said, ‘Oh, General, Colin rollerblades in the park. Don’t you think that’s wonderful?’

He went crimson and could hardly get his words out as he replied, ‘Yes, ma’am. I think it’s… tremendous.’

I could hardly believe my ears. I realised then that whatever anybody said could be completely overturned by the Queen Mother. Here was a general who, with a passing comment from her, would drop his opinion on something completely. It was a crazy situation. But not as crazy in hindsight, because all the Queen Mother was doing was protecting her inner circle. Loyalty worked both ways with her. But the bottom line was that she could say what she wanted when she wanted and no one would disagree with her. And it was this inner strength and self-confidence that I found so beguiling. She would often give me guidance on life and encourage me to be confident and open and friendly with everyone I met. When you get someone with ninety plus years of experience, as she had, giving you advice and tips you take them and act on them. One of her favourite pieces of advice, which she told me a number of times, was: ‘Colin, whenever we are having a drinks or dinner party you must always greet people at the door as if they are your long lost friends and make them feel comfortable, and keep pouring the drinks until they say stop. At the end of the evening, wave them off and don’t stop waving until they are out of sight.’

She gave this advice to all her staff and we all listened and followed it.

To be involved with someone so confident and seemingly bullet-proof was wonderful. I just kept thinking, here was such a caring and sincere woman and yet she had been feared by Hitler. She cared about everyone who worked for her, or who passed through her life. To her, a cleaner had just the same emotions and strength of feeling as, for example, the prime minister, and if they felt upset or aggrieved, then their point of view was just as valid as someone else’s. Everyone revered her and her way of life, Prince Charles especially. He understood her outlook and stance on life completely. She just took things as they presented themselves. Hers was an old, innocent world and her approach to life was one that was dying out. I found that I fitted into this world quite easily.

Coming from an Army background I could always fall back on the tradition, etiquette and formal routine I was used to in the military. I instinctively knew what to do, and confidence in meeting people stems from knowing that you are doing the right thing. If you know how to address people, you are in good shape and everything is fine. Some people meeting the Queen Mother were reduced to nervous wrecks because they just didn’t know the correct procedure or even how to address her. This is where breeding comes in. Being ‘well bred’ really comes down to an innate knowledge of how to be comfortable in certain social situations. Some of the people who visited Clarence House were fazed by everything around them and others were completely at ease with it all. Usually, I found that the higher a person was up the social ladder, and particularly so with high-ranking military guests, the more at ease with themselves and those around them they were. And, if an occasion needed livening up, the Queen Mother as the greatest of social operators was more than willing to step in and chivvy things along. On one occasion, when she was entertaining guests who included the Archbishop of Canterbury and various military officers, things were moving a bit slowly and the party seemed to be breaking up into cliques, so she grabbed hold of one of the generals and pushed him over to the other side of the room, saying ‘Well, go on, go and talk to them then’. She then turned to me and said, ‘It’s just like being with children. I have to encourage them, otherwise they won’t say hello.’

I thought it was just wonderful. She broke down the awkwardness of the situation and within a few minutes the party was in full swing. It was easy for the Queen Mother to break the ice at parties because people just blossomed in her presence and nobody was ever rude to her. If they were – and I believe some people had been in the past – they were given short shrift by her and you would never see them again. But everybody I encountered was quite reverential in her presence and they included staunch antiroyalists. There were times on walkabouts when one of her protection officers would tip me off about a certain person who was going to be there who could present a problem or cause some sort of commotion and I was told to be on guard and watchful. So I would prepare myself for a possible confrontation only to find that when the Queen Mother turned up they would go quiet. It really was the strangest thing. Prince Charles has a similar effect on people. I was present at one of his Highgrove dinner parties where an Australian woman friend of mine, who didn’t like the idea of royalty at all, kept asking me, ‘What’s so special about the Royal Family? When Charles turns up, I’m not going to curtsey and later on I’m going to tell him what I really think about the Monarchy.’

Of course, when Prince Charles arrived, he exuded this natural warmth and charm, much more so than when you see him on television, and she was just blown away. She gave the deepest curtsey you have ever seen and was a model of deference and politeness. I smiled at her and she just shrugged her shoulders as if to say what can I do, the man is just too nice to be rude to. However, Prince Charles has ways of getting out of tricky situations and one of his favourite exits from awkward questions, particularly from women who try to be too forward with him, is to make light of what is said with a big smile. On one walkabout a woman approached him and said, ‘You’re nice, can I have kiss?’

After the briefest of awkward pauses, he immediately sprung to life with a beaming smile and laughed and said, ‘Oh, you do say the funniest things,’ before moving swiftly on.

I was always aware throughout my two years’ service that I was working for a woman whom history would remember for a long, long time. She was born Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Bowes Lyon, the ninth of ten brothers and sisters, on 4 August 1900, while Queen Victoria was still on the throne, and she spent her early childhood at Glamis Castle in Scotland, which was originally a hunting lodge for the early kings of Scotland. The royal connection seems to run through the place like blue blood. In 1034, King Malcolm II was wounded in a battle nearby and died in the castle and a room there is named after him. Fast forward 350 years and the seeds of the present family were sown when Sir John Lyon married Princess Joanna, the widowed daughter of King Robert II, who granted the feudal barony of Glamis to his son-in-law and the family prospered, and I mean, really prospered. By the start of the seventeenth century, they were regarded as the wealthiest in Scotland, but their wealth was squandered by the 2nd Earl of Strathmore to help finance an army of Covenanters. However, it was recovered by the 3rd Earl, who became Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, a title that survives to this day.

In the eighteenth century, the 9th Earl married the wealthy heiress Mary Eleanor Bowes and he also became Lord Bowes, inheriting estates in England, and adopted the present name of Bowes Lyon as the family name. The then Lady Elizabeth spent much of her early years playing with her younger brother, David, who was born twenty-one months after her. One of their favourite games involved pouring buckets of water from the battlements of Glamis onto ‘invaders’ below. Their relaxed attitude was probably a reflection of their parents’, who, rather than being stiff and aristocratic, were very friendly and genial towards their staff. Something that I could see had rubbed off on the Queen Mother. She had more warmth and compassion towards her employees than any other member of the Royal Family.

My one regret is that we never travelled to Glamis while I was with her. It would have been wonderful to see the place, but the Queen Mother never really spoke about it, nor her brother. Her only reference to her early years was in passing when she told me: ‘My mother had advised me that, when walking past a certain gentleman’s club in London when I was in my late teens, I was not to look into it because it was a very bad place. She kept telling me never to look in the window. So I never did. But once when I was walking past it, a man walking towards me suddenly stopped and said, “Oh, blue eyes.” He had no idea who I was.’

This really thrilled her because I think it was the first time her looks had been commented on and, although she must only have been about nineteen, she was becoming aware that men were seeing her no longer as a young girl but as an attractive woman. But it was rare for her to bring up the subject of her family like this. Her family was never really a topic of conversation in my presence; it was just another part of her life that had passed along with most of her friends. She was not one for dwelling on what had gone, although she did like to talk about World War II.

Secret documents only recently released show that when Britain faced its darkest hour, during the Dunkirk evacuation, plans were drawn up in the case of any German invasion to spirit away Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret to the home of the Earl and Countess Beauchamp, Madresfield Court, just outside Malvern, where they would stay until King George VI and the Queen could join them from Buckingham Palace. A month later, the government drew up plans to evacuate the princesses to Canada. But Queen Elizabeth famously said no and they stayed. By 1941, when fear of German invasion was at its height, five officers and 124 troops of the Coldstream Guards had been set aside to evacuate the Royal Family. Using ten armoured vehicles they were to move them between seven remote country houses, depending on how successful Britain was in beating off German invaders, before ultimately taking them out of the country if it looked like the Nazis would be successful. I often remember the Queen Mother saying to other guests and myself: ‘The King had no intention of abandoning Britain. We would have seen it out to the bitter end. You do not abandon your country.’

She was ninety-four years old when I started the job and ninety-six when I left and she coped with old age brilliantly, being much sprightlier than people half her age. Add to this the fact that she was completely alert and you had quite a formidable old lady, though she did nearly come a cropper and kill herself in my presence during a walk in the grounds of the Castle of Mey, when she slipped on a mossy step and almost went tumbling down a flight of concrete stairs. As she fell backwards, I managed to grab her by the lapels of her coat and hoist her back onto her feet. The funny thing was that after saving her life in such a dramatic way, she didn’t say thank you and I didn’t ask her if she was all right. Etiquette prevented such an exchange. In her eyes, I was doing my job in preventing her from falling and, for my part, to ask her if she was okay would have almost been an admission that she had made a mistake. How bizarre is that? So we just carried on walking and it was never mentioned again.

This business of doing the right thing was the way she had lived all her life; it was a world in which you never let your true feelings show and always maintained an air of calm and placid detachment. The Queen Mother never got annoyed or angry with anyone or anything during the whole time I was with her and she took a detached view of virtually everything. If something did upset her, she would say ‘Oh, isn’t that annoying?’ But there was no emotion involved and throughout her life she never really talked about any personal loss or her private feelings – people of her generation rarely did. Similarly, she never expressed a personal opinion on anything, at least not one that could be considered controversial, not that she didn’t have controversial opinions. Early in her marriage to the then Duke of York, she had been severely told off by George V for giving an interview to the press and this hit her for six and she never let her true feelings be shown in front of anyone other than her family ever again.

The media became a tool for her to peddle the notion of the Royal Family doing the right thing for the nation, and everything to do with television and newspapers that involved her was very considered. She would never give an interview or go on television unless it was absolutely necessary and that is why she was hardly ever seen in the media apart from on special occasions such as her birthday. So newspaper reports came down to little nuggets that reporters could pick up from friendly members of staff. As a result, her actions have often been reported and repeated time and again on television and in the newspapers, such as when she came across a group of teenagers throwing stones at cars and, winding down the window of her passing Daimler, asked them, ‘Whatever would American tourists think?’ Another excellent quote that was widely reported was her comment, ‘Is it just me or are pensioners getting younger these days?’

The Queen is similar: she never expresses her views in public. The closest she ever came to expressing in public how she truly felt was in describing her annus horribilis, her bad year of 1992, which people still refer to even today. But personal loss, grief, turmoil and emotion had been at the centre of the Queen Mother’s life for well over half a century; there was the abdication of King Edward VIII, the Second World War and the loss of her husband King George VI in 1952, to mention but a few examples. I think one of the saddest aspects about her life was that by the end of my time working for her, the Queen Mother had lost about ninety-five per cent of the friends she had known, simply because she had outlived them all, and this tempered her views on death. When your first real friend dies, it is shocking and you grieve, but by the time your umpteenth friend has passed away you have become more used to it, and this is what had happened with the Queen Mother. I remember when we were staying at Sandringham in 1995 and Ralph went to see his best friend who was seriously ill and close to death. By the time he got there he only had a few hours with his old pal before the poor fellow died. On returning to Sandringham, the Queen Mother asked him, ‘Oh, how was your friend?’

To which an ashen-faced Ralph replied, ‘Well, he died, ma’am.’

She looked at him and just said, ‘Oh well.’

And that was that. But it wasn’t said in a glib way. It was recognition of the fact that there is little one can one say in a situation like that, and her way of saying that one element of life is death and you just have to get on with things.

Ralph responded with a simple ‘Ah, yes’ and got back to his work.

This stoicism had become entrenched in her psyche and there was no way anybody would ever change it. It was the same stoic determination that had got her through World War II. She lived in a world of formality, where she would never have involved herself in a drunken knees-up, or put her arm around someone as a way of comforting them. Everything in her life had a set format and the rules were there and they served a purpose. The purpose of the routine at Clarence House was to make her life as comfortable as possible. But despite living this rigorous, antiquated life, she did have a mischievous streak and loved to turn situations on their head. One of her favourite ruses was to sneak out of Clarence House whenever David Linley, her grandson, paid her a visit to go for a spin in his sports car. She loved the fact that she was being smuggled away without her protection officers seeing her, and she got a buzz out of doing things she wasn’t supposed to do. She did like being a bit naughty. I remember one evening at Birkhall when there were no guests and it was just her and the home team and she said to me, ‘Colin, let’s ring round and see if someone wants to come in for a drink.’

‘Certainly, ma’am,’ I said.

I was about to pick up the phone to invite someone from one of the Scottish regiments when she added, ‘Let’s invite the minister and his wife for a game of cards. We could play poker!’ and she smiled at me.

For a second my heart raced. I thought, how the hell can I phone a Scottish clergyman and ask him to come over to Birkhall for a gambling session? He would have me damned for all eternity. But then I realised she was joking and smiled back, more out of relief than anything else.

That mischievous streak in her also manifested itself during official visits to factories and civic buildings and the like. She would be following an itinerary that had been strictly set whrn suddenly she would see a closed door that her party wasn’t really supposed to go through and she would ask, ‘Oh, what’s this room for?’

She refused to be railroaded on these sorts of trips. If anyone was going to do the railroading, it was going to be her. At airports, if she was waiting to fly somewhere, she might see one of the aeroplane staff refuelling a plane or a cleaner on his or her rounds and would ask to speak to them. There then ensued a lengthy conversation, far longer than she would have had with any high-ranking airport boss who was officially supposed to meet her. She had become quite bored, after nearly 100 years, of being presented with people whom her organisers thought she should meet. This is also one of Prince Charles’s big gripes. He only really gets to meet people chosen by his members of staff and he does find it intensely irritating. Most members of the Royal Family will try and grab someone who isn’t part of the agenda because when they are trapped in a bubble it is quite nice for them to break out once in a while, albeit for just a few minutes. The one thing the Queen Mother didn’t like about itineraries and agendas was the whole idea of the media scrum – the jostling that represented the press photographers desperate for the picture, which would sell newspapers and make them a tidy sum. She disliked the thought of organised photo calls where she would be expected to pose for a picture and would use all her wiliness and guile to overcome the problem. At a Field of Remembrance service at which I was present, there was a huge press pack waiting with cameras ready as she signed the visitors’ book. But unlike at celebrity functions, they showed slightly more respect for the Queen Mother than they would for other Royals and didn’t ask her outright for a photograph. She didn’t want to do a staged one either, so she looked up into each and every camera lens in a broad sweeping turn of her head and said, with a big smile on her face, ‘Has anybody got the time?’ All you could hear was click, click, click and more clicks.

Her treatment by the press was immense and totally different to the sort of press her grandchildren got. None of the press ever hounded her, and everyone played by her rules and was utterly charming to her. So she played and handled the press in a totally differently way than, say, Charles and Diana did. They tried to use the press as a weapon to hurt each other and other people. Because of this they were seen as fair game by newspapers such as the Sun, the Mail and the Mirror who tore into them like savages. The Queen Mother never used the press in this way and would never make a destructive point through the medium of a newspaper. She really wasn’t interested in doing anything negative like that and, as a result, she was respected much more in those sorts of circles than Charles and Diana and all her grandchildren, if the truth be told. By the time she was in her nineties, her involvement with television and newspapers simply involved making sure she was available for photos if the event demanded. Whenever anything negative came out about the Royal Family, it left her deeply disappointed. I remember saying to her, ‘Did you see the Dimbleby interview with Prince Charles on TV?’

The look she gave me could have frozen fire. There was a smile there but she spoke through gritted teeth and her eyes narrowed slightly as she said, ‘Some things are best not discussed.’ She meant that he shouldn’t have done it and, probably more pointedly, I shouldn’t be asking her about it.

She firmly believed that all her family should never go on record about anything that was even slightly contentious and they should keep their views to themselves. But it was hard for her to ignore all the negative press that was flying around. If she read a report that she deemed insulting to her family, she would mutter, ‘Oh gosh, not this again.’

The years when I was at Clarence House proved to be quite a hard time for her because she was very old-fashioned and an extremely private person. With stories such as ‘Camillagate’ breaking and all the talk of tampons and such like, one can imagine how awkward that would be for anyone to read, let alone the Queen Mother who was utterly embarrassed and refused to talk about these things to anyone, even her closest friends. If anyone did bring up the subject of Charles and Diana’s marriage, they would be quickly diverted to something else, mainly by the Queen Mother saying, ‘Have some more wine and tell me about…’. This was a woman who disapproved if someone went out incorrectly dressed. To go out into the world and reveal the most intimate problems in a relationship was really not on in her mind.

The majority of media enquiries were handled by Alastair on behalf of the Queen Mother and he did most of the press releases. But by that time there was no great demand for the Queen Mother because everyone knew she didn’t make her opinions known in public, so it was a bit of a fruitless task to ring up anyway. The majority of calls we took were from people like Jennie Bond, who was the BBC’s royal correspondent before the call of the jungle in I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here! took her on to new ventures.

I spoke to Jennie quite a lot on the phone. She seemed busy to the point of manic. One minute she was in this country, the next thousands of miles away. She frequently asked to come in and look at something or other or to get some background material from us. She was a typical television royal correspondent. I did find that the more discreet they were, as was Jennie, the better they seemed to do their job. As soon as they started to become a little bit aggressive and tried to dish the dirt, everybody simply closed ranks and wouldn’t talk to them. It was quite an odd relationship with the press that I would describe as love–hate. Jennie was good because she was so professional. She didn’t try to inflame things and she didn’t ask pointed questions, so people didn’t mind talking to her, plus she was very mindful of protocol and that is the strength of a good royal correspondent. There were other reporters, mainly from the tabloids, who were constantly after the inside scoop, obviously because of the nature of the newspaper they worked for. But most people who were close to royalty and had the inside knowledge that these journalists were after didn’t like that kind of approach. The successful ones were the ones who respected the system, dressed appropriately and observed protocol when in front of senior members of the Royal Family. But, on the other hand, you always got certain junior employees who were willing to sell stories to the press behind their employers’ backs and I strongly suspect this was going on at Clarence House. I would often spot a story in a newspaper about the Queen Mother and wonder where it came from because it certainly didn’t come from her. Fortunately, most of the stories weren’t negative anyway, but I suspect that most of the junior butlers and some of the cooks were on the payroll of at least one Fleet Street newspaper. They were not on great salaries so this was an easy way of boosting their income, plus they were easy to infiltrate.

None of the home team ever sold anything to the press; we just tolerated the fact that this went on, though in the years I was there, I don’t think I can recall any bad press for the Queen Mother. If she had her royal correspondents of choice, they would have been the Dimblebys, and this extended to nearly all the senior members of the Royal Family. I remember asking Ralph why the Royals were so keen on this family and he said, ‘It’s because of their background. The Royal Family feel much more comfortable in the presence of people from a similar background to theirs. It’s all down to breeding. They wouldn’t really like disclosing family secrets to someone from a comprehensive school.’

The Queen Mother did have her paper of choice, it was the Daily Telegraph, but she read the newspapers less and less as the scandal stories broke on an almost daily basis throughout the mid nineties. If she passed a newspaper and caught the headline, be it about Charles and Diana or Andrew and Fergie, she would utter words of disappointment and go quiet for a bit and become slightly withdrawn. Everything that was going on exasperated her. She couldn’t understand why they behaved as they did. In the fifties and sixties the newspapers had left the Royal Family in peace but it all changed for the worse in the eighties and nineties. The Queen Mother couldn’t understand the new tabloid culture that had arisen around the birth of the Sun newspaper, and the whole concept of modernising the Monarchy and dragging it from the past into the present – which effectively began when the Royals threw open the doors of the Palace for a television documentary in the late sixties – seemed completely alien to her. In her eyes, the whole idea of modernisation and embracing the media just seemed to entail more bad publicity for her grandchildren, and ideas being bandied about at the time regarding the Royal Family’s having to pay taxes and certain lesser Royals being struck off the Civil List were kept well away from her ears. It would have completely undermined her life and upset her. She and her daughters had a duty to serve the State as ambassadors of the nation. For the State to repay this devotion to duty by making her family pay taxes would have been too hideous for her to bear.

She had no concept of modernising anything. There wasn’t even a computer in Clarence House and right up until her death everything was done by hand. She liked things the way they were and, as a woman in her mid nineties, there was absolutely no way she was ever going to change her lifestyle. The world at Clarence House quite rightly revolved around her and that was that, and in this sense she didn’t always keep up with changing trends and the biggest at that time was the concept of political correctness.

She was quite fond of being un-PC and didn’t like the notion of political correctness, thinking it nonsense. She would say things to me such as: ‘It’s not politically correct to look down on our European neighbours, is it? But I still find the Germans beastly.’

It was the same with food fads and diets. She had never gone on a diet in her life and was never going to, but it didn’t stop her from saying to me, ‘People say it’s not good to eat butter. People say butter is bad for your heart. Well, I have eaten butter all my life and look at me.’

How could you argue with a woman of ninety-four saying that? And she did love butter. She slapped it on to her toast and bread with gusto, great lumps of it.

She also had a thing about the class system and was what I would term a reluctant aristocrat. There was nothing pompous or pretentious about her whatsoever; she didn’t need to be. People are pompous when they feel socially threatened or believe that they are above someone in terms of their job or social standing. But the Queen Mother was at the pinnacle of the social stratum. There really was no need on her account to be aggressive or pompous because she didn’t have to prove anything. She liked to poke fun at the whole social categorisation frenzy that was still at large in class-ridden Britain. One of her favourite comments to me was when she would hold up a piece of bread and say, ‘Colin, aristocrats call these rolls. Everyone else calls them buns. What do you call them? I call them buns because I’m not an aristocrat.’

The Royals are in a class of their own. Historically, they were and always have been served by the upper classes, which put them above this bracket in many respects. Describing the Royal Family as upper class would be like drawing a parallel between the role of an astronaut and an airline pilot. They both fly, but there is such a difference. The Royal Family is in a completely different world and the members of it live their life in their own little bubble that is far removed from anything you would ever find outside the palace gates. But I found myself under more pressure in terms of social graces and manners at things like Army dinners than when with the Royal Family – which made me realise that the further away you get from the centre of royalty the more rigid formality becomes, whereas if I were having lunch with the Queen Mother and wanted to use a different fork, or even my hands where appropriate, to eat my food, she would make everything alright. At one lunch, a guest picked up his soup bowl and drank straight from it. Quick as a flash the Queen Mother said, ‘I always think soup tastes much better that way.’

If anyone had considered looking on disapprovingly, they certainly didn’t after that. And that was the wonderful thing about the Queen Mother. She could rewrite the rules as she went along. With her you just had to behave in a decent and civilised manner at all times.

Leisure time, or what I would class as time she spent alone, was limited and therefore very precious to her. She spent a lot of it napping, usually because she had been through a heavy lunch or dinner, or on a shooting and fishing trip, or a visit, but when she didn’t sleep she would watch television. Her favourite programme by a mile was Fawlty Towers. I’m not joking when I say she must have watched it over thirty times in the two years I was there and she always found it funny. Her favourite bit was the one with the Germans and the whole ‘Don’t mention the war’ thing. She would often quote from Fawlty Towers if the moment asked for it. If a lunch guest asked her if she had enjoyed her food, she would reply, ‘“It’s delicious and nutritious.”’

A couple of times we had veal for lunch and on both occasions she turned to me and asked, ‘What do you think of the meal, Colin? I think it’s veally good.’

She chose her moments and really came out with some funny things. She was always saying ‘Don’t mention the war’, but never when she had Germans present, funnily enough. She also paraphrased another moment involving the character of the Major and would say to me, ‘Do you know the thing about German women, Colin? Good card players.’ And she would point in a perfect mimic of the Major then laugh heartily and say, ‘Oh I do love that show.’

Another favourite programme of hers was Keeping Up Appearances; she found Hyacinth Bucket and her over-the-top affectations extremely funny. When she wasn’t watching comedy, she would generally watch horse racing if she watched anything. Very occasionally, she would see a film that David Linley brought in for her. He would just rent whatever was out at the time. It could be anything from Four Weddings and a Funeral to Jurassic Park. But she wasn’t that keen on watching movies that went on for more than a couple of hours because she found that she started to fall asleep midway through them. Occasionally, she would say, ‘I understand there’s a good documentary on about this or that, could you get hold of it for me?’

So I would either tape it or, if it were available in the video shop, I would rent it out.

Her favourite documentaries were about the wars, be it the Great War or the Second World War. When I left Clarence House after two years and went into television, I did a series on World War II and the rise of the Nazi party. It was a potted history of the party up to the outbreak of hostilities. I gave her a box set and she really loved it and every time I went back after that – former equerries were invited to lunch once every couple of months after they left – it was virtually all she talked about for the whole meal.

Her other main interest was music. She especially loved Scottish piped music and easy listening, such as Frank Sinatra, Perry Como and Dean Martin. But for some bizarre reason she also enjoyed yodelling songs. She thought they were so bad they were actually good and she had this huge fascination for them. In effect they were so corny and so bloody awful that at times I just wanted to break the records into tiny little pieces and have done with them. But her big thrill, fortunately, was singers like Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire and the easy-listening melodies of women like Carol Gibbons; she was a big fan of Carol Gibbons. Had she ever have appeared on Desert Island Discs, I am sure Carol Gibbons would have been her record of choice to take with her to this desert island. Her favourite songs were things like ‘Riptide’, which I heard on at least a dozen occasions. Strangely enough, she wasn’t that bothered by opera music, although she did like some classical music, mainly Mozart, but not as much as her easy-listening collection. She would listen to music in the early evening when I was mixing her a Martini. But she didn’t choose the records herself; more often than not, it was left to me to stick something on the record player, especially if we had guests. If it were just the home team there, everybody just chipped in, making their own drinks and choosing records on behalf of the Queen Mother. Sometimes I would say to her, ‘How about a bit of yodelling, ma’am?’

She would laugh and reply, ‘Oh, marvellous.’

But she did like people making their own decisions about what music to play, as long as it was from her collection.

She also had a passion for military music which she didn’t really have on tape but would listen to at big events. The music composed for her 100th birthday is the one thing that sticks in my mind. It is utterly, utterly moving. The bagpipes, or agony pipes as I like to call them, were another big love of hers. But things like pop music had completely passed her by. Her musical tastes were stuck somewhere in the fifties and sixties and didn’t extend too much into the nineties, if at all. And her Scottish ancestry had given her a love of reeling, or cross-country dancing as I call it. She loved it, absolutely loved it. At Birkhall, we had evenings of Scottish dancing and the Queen Mother loved people taking part and would sit there smiling, clapping and whooping to the music and generally having a really good time. She liked her guests to have a good time as well, which is why she insisted everybody join in the dancing, and I mean everybody, including me. I was all right at it, but midway through a dance I would be wishing for it to end. I know some guests who were dragged almost kicking and screaming to their feet to perform this ritual and by the look on their face – a combination of a self-conscious smile and beetroot-red cheeks – it was obvious to me that they would rather have been dragged naked across a field of broken glass than do what they were doing, but they did it anyway. I would compare it to having to do drill practice at 5.00 in the morning in the middle of winter. But the Queen Mother loved a good dance, and so did Prince Charles. There were a couple of occasions when he joined her at Birkhall for one of these Scottish knees-up. He was a really good dancer and did genuinely enjoy himself.

As for other interests, well, things like current affairs and the state of the world had left her behind. She didn’t really bother with it anymore. If anything newsworthy broke, we would inform her of it – at that time it was mainly the conflicts in the Balkans. But she was nearly 100 years old and wasn’t really very bothered about what was going on in those places. She had lived through two world wars and the death of her husband. All she was interested in now was a quiet life surrounded by friends. Very occasionally, she would read a book. She enjoyed fiction and her favourite novelist was Dick Francis. Because of the racing connection she loved having him round for lunch to talk horses. But she didn’t read that many books when I was there. Her eyesight was not that great and she had great difficulty reading small print. She had a magnifying glass, but found it all a bit of a strain.

Despite this, there was no slowness about her and she was never forgetful; in fact, I found her great company. Whereas most world leaders would be lucky to get ten minutes alone in her presence, I would be alone with her for at least half an hour every day, especially on picnic lunches in Scotland when we would often be alone waiting for the other guests to turn up. These moments were quite magical. She would tell me about dancing with Fred Astaire and with a glint in her eye add, ‘He was quite a good dancer, you know.’

A great story she told me during those moments alone was when, during the War, she and the King went on a tour of bombed houses and shops in London’s East End. She said, ‘On this particular day, I had managed to get hold of a banana and I had this banana in my bag. Now, at that time, bananas hadn’t really been introduced into Britain as a fruit, so many people didn’t know anything about them. I remember this little girl, whose house had been bombed, came up to greet me and I gave her this banana. She said to me, “What is this? What do I do with this?”

‘I said, it is a banana and you eat it. She turned to her mother who was standing right behind her and said, “Must I?”

‘And her mother said, “Just eat it.”

‘Colin, I’m not even certain that she peeled it before taking a bite,’ she said as she smiled at me.

It was a lovely moment for me; to be getting first-hand accounts of history from someone with such historic significance herself was like touring the National Gallery in the presence of van Gogh. It seemed beyond the realm of what is ordinarily possible.