Читать книгу Corgi and Bess: More Wit and Wisdom from the House of Windsor - Thomas Blaikie - Страница 6

Big panic during rehearsals for George VI’s Coronation — the orb, part of the near-sacred Coronation regalia, was nowhere to be found, until someone heard a giveaway rumbling from under a table. Princess Margaret, aged 6, had seized it and was rolling it around on the floor.

In later life Princess Margaret was recalling younger and happier days when her father would be practising for Trooping the Colour at home and used to let her try on his bearskin. But her story came to a peculiar halt. Evidently there was something else of significance she had to say, something that almost couldn’t be said. ‘Sometimes …’ she murmured, ‘he let me put on the crown.’

At Windsor Castle Princess Margaret once flung open a door and shouted into the room where the Queen was sitting with some top person or other, ‘Nobody would speak to you if you weren’t the Queen!’

After a State Dinner at Windsor, there was a tour of the Castle, with the Queen as chief guide. The rest of the party was supposed to be listening respectfully. In a certain room, there was a pause and the Queen invited people to inspect various items that had been laid out. But Princess Margaret sat down on a sofa for a good old natter with Edna Healey about the latter’s recent meeting with Group Captain Townsend. When the Queen moved off into another room, her sister stayed put. Can you imagine? An unfortunate attendant tried to drop a hint. ‘Go away,’ Princess Margaret snapped, ‘I’m talking to Mrs Healey.’

One day Prince William was moaning about the forthcoming but surely distant burden of kingship. Quick as a flash, Prince Harry said, ‘If you won’t do it, then I will.’

There was an accident during a shooting lunch at Sandringham. A footman picked up a coffee pot and failed to notice that the gas burner it had been sitting over had somehow remained attached. It fell onto Princess Margaret whose napkin went up in flames. ‘Oh, look, they’re trying to set fire to Margo,’ the Queen commented, with not a great deal of dismay.

The Queen Mother gave her eldest daughter not only her own first name but her own initials too. The Queen Mother was Elizabeth Angela Marguerite and the Queen is Elizabeth Alexandra Mary.

At her wedding, the Queen Mother left her tiny handbag in the carriage on arrival at the Abbey. When the Queen, as Princess Elizabeth, was married, she did exactly the same thing — either on purpose or by coincidence.

At Birkhall the Queen Mother had a huge ER cut out in a lawn and planted with French marigolds (not African, which she disliked). She said, ‘One will do for me and the other for the Queen.’ But which one? The R or the E?

The Queen Mother reeled in astonishment when, at lunch, the usually abstemious Queen asked for a second glass of wine. ‘Are you sure, dear? You have got to reign all afternoon, you know.’

Before it was modernised in the 1970s, Sandringham was a terrible fire hazard. Frequent fire drills were necessary, during which members of the Royal Family would stand in one corner of the lawn, waiting to be counted, while other departments of the Household stood in other corners. On one occasion, Princess Margaret failed to appear. A harried maid appealed to the Queen Mother for help in getting her out of bed but the Princess’s mother just said, ‘Oh, well, she’ll just have to burn, won’t she?’

When the Royal Family were touring South Africa together in 1947, Princess Elizabeth, as she then was, used her umbrella as a kind of cattle-prod if her mother, the Queen, was lingering too long in idle conversation. A quick jab in the ankles usually did the trick.

Princess Margaret claimed that she drove the Lord Chamberlain up the wall by forever altering her funeral arrangements. At one time she had a whim to be buried at sea. But all the chopping and changing was worth it because what could have been more perfect than the ruse she finally came up with — to be cremated (never mind the indignity of Slough public crematorium) in order to be sufficiently reduced in size to fit snugly into the kingly tomb of her parents, George VI and Queen Elizabeth, leaving Lilibet to fend for herself elsewhere.

At lunch at Windsor the Queen mentioned Gravadlax, at the time a novelty. ‘It’s pickled,’ she explained. ‘Raw salmon. Pickled. Quite extraordinary.’ The other guests were intrigued, but Princess Margaret took exception. ‘No, it isn’t. It’s smoked,’ she insisted. The Queen explained patiently she had tried it herself, had made inquiries as to how it was made. ‘No, it’s smoked,’ said Margaret. ‘Otherwise it would go bad.’ They carried on like this, good-naturedly, for some time until the Queen deftly changed the subject.^*

At a military dinner a drunken soldier staggered towards Princess Margaret, but before he could say anything disgraceful, the Colonel-in-Chief had the presence of mind to shout: ‘Go away and sit down!’ As they watched the man lurching back to his place, the Princess said, ‘That’s just what the Queen’s always saying to her corgis but they don’t take a blind bit of notice.’

It’s bad form to wear white to a wedding — competing with the bride. So why did the Queen choose a white wool coat for the Charles and Camilla Blessing Service in 2005? Especially suspicious when you think it’s not a colour she usually wears. And then, during the service, she upstaged the entire congregation by being the only one who could sing the whole of ‘Immortal, invisible’ without once referring to the service sheet.

Early on in her affair with the Prince of Wales, Wallis Simpson began to get ideas above her station. Visiting Buckingham Palace at the Prince’s insistence but, as far as everybody else was concerned, absolutely on sufferance, she looked out of the window and saw some of Queen Mary’s favourite flower-beds. ‘When I live here,’ she remarked appreciatively, ‘those will be tennis-courts.’

There was much controversy over the ‘improvements’ Raine Spencer, Princess Diana’s stepmother, made at Althorp. Particularly loathed was the ugly double-glazing, which was awkward to open and which the present Earl has largely removed. Visiting in the 1980s, Princess Diana complained about the lack of ventilation in her bedroom. But later in the visit she came up with a straightforward solution: she smashed the glass.