Lady in Waiting Read online

  In one photograph we are all standing in a line. Princess Elizabeth is frowning at Princess Margaret, suspecting she is up to no good, while Princess Margaret is staring down at my shoes. Years afterwards, I showed Princess Margaret the photo and asked, “Ma’am, why were you looking at my feet?”

  And she replied, “Well, I was so jealous because you had silver shoes and I had brown ones.”

  In the summer the Princesses would come down to Holkham beach where we would spend whole days making sandcastles, clad in the most unattractive and prickly black bathing suits with black rubber caps and shoes. The nannies would bundle us all into the beach bus, along with wicker picnic baskets full of sandwiches, and set up in the beach hut every day, whatever the weather—the grown-ups had a separate hut among the trees at the back. We had wonderful times, digging holes in the sand, hoping people would fall into them.

  Every Christmas, my family would go to a party at Buckingham Palace, and Carey and I would be dressed up in frilly frocks and the coveted silver shoes. At the end of the parties, the children would be invited to take a present each from the big table in the hall near the Christmas tree. Behind the table stood the formidable Queen Mary, who was quite frightening. She was tall and imposing, and Princess Margaret never warmed to her because every time she saw her, Queen Mary would say, “I can see you haven’t grown.” Princess Margaret minded frightfully about being small all her life, so she never liked her grandmother.

  Queen Mary did teach me a valuable life lesson, however. One year Carey rushed up to the table and clasped a huge teddy bear, which was sitting upright among the other presents. Before I chose mine, Queen Mary leaned down towards me. “Anne,” she said quietly, “quite often rather nice, rather valuable things come in little boxes.” I froze. I’d had my eye on another teddy bear but now I was far too frightened to choose anything other than a little box. Inside it was a beautiful necklace of pearl and coral. Queen Mary was quite right. My little box contained something that is still appreciated to this day.

  Our connection to the Royal Family was close. When I was in my late teens, Prince Charles became like a younger brother to me, spending weeks with us all at Holkham. He would come to stay whenever he had any of the contagious childhood diseases, like chickenpox, because the Queen, having never gone to school, had not been exposed to them. Sixteen years younger than me, Prince Charles was nearer in age to my youngest sister Sarah, but all of us would go off to the beach together.

  My father taught him how to fish for eel in the lake, and when he got a bit older, my mother let him drive the Jaguar and the VW Mini Minor around the park, something he loved doing, sending great long thank-you letters telling her he couldn’t wait to return. He was such a kind and loving little boy and I’ve loved him ever since—the whole family have always been deeply fond of him.

  As soon as I was old enough to ride, I made the park at Holkham my own, riding past the great barn, making little jumps for Kitty, my pony. When we were a bit older, Carey and I would follow one of the very good-looking tenant farmers, Gary Maufe, on our ponies. Many years later I became a great friend of his wife, Marit. He used to gallop across the park on a great big black stallion, and after him we would go on our hopeless ponies, giddying them up, desperately trying to keep up.

  It wasn’t just my family who were part of Holkham but everybody who worked on the estate, some of whom had very distinctive characters. Mr. Patterson, the head gardener, would enthusiastically play his bagpipes in the mornings whenever my parents had friends to stay, until my mother would shout, “That’s quite enough, Mr. Patterson, thank you!”

  My early childhood was idyllic, but the outbreak of war in 1939 changed everything. I was seven, Carey was five. My father was posted to Egypt with the Scots Guards so my mother followed to support him, as many wives did. Holkham Hall was partly occupied by the army, and the temple in the park was used to house the Home Guard, while the gardeners and footmen were called up, and the maids and cooks went off to work in factories to help with the war effort.

  Everybody thought the Germans would choose to invade Britain from the Norfolk coast, so before my mother left for Egypt, she moved Carey and me up to Scotland, to stay with my Great-aunt Bridget, away from Mr. Hitler’s U-boats.

  When she said goodbye, she told me, “Anne, you’re in charge. You’ve got to look after Carey.” If we had known how long she was going to be away, it would have been even harder, but no one had any idea how long the war would last and that, in fact, she and my father would be gone for three years.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Hitler’s Mess

  WE WENT TO live with our Ogilvy cousins in Downie Park, one of the Ogilvys’ shooting lodges in Angus: their main house, Cortachy Castle, had been requisitioned and was being used as a hospital for Polish officers.

  Although Carey and I were unsettled by the separation from our parents, going to Scotland felt like an adventure. I loved my Ogilvy cousins. There were six of them, and the three youngest—David, Angus, and James—were all about the same age as me and Carey. We knew them well because every summer they would come and stay at Holkham, having great fun together, exploring and making up games. We watched as the boys played endless rounds of cricket on the terrace, wearing their special linen kilts that Carey and I wished we had. Our nanny wasn’t quite so keen on them all because the best fruit—a valuable treat in those days—was kept for them and she would say they had come to “take over.”

  They were all very welcoming at Downie Park, and I was especially fond of David, whom I followed everywhere. I adored their mother, my Great-aunt Bridget, who was born Lady Alexandra Coke and was my grandfather’s sister.

  Great-aunt Bridget was a Christian Scientist—a nineteenth-century religion established by Mary Baker Eddy, which, during the First World War, cut a swathe through the aristocracy, converting many to it. It operates on the belief that sickness is an illusion that can be corrected by prayer. This provided comfort for Great-aunt Bridget and her husband, my Great-uncle Joe, the Earl of Airlie, because he, like many men, was suffering from the effects of the Great War. Great-aunt Bridget practiced her beliefs and passed on many useful pieces of advice to me. Perhaps the advice that stuck with me most is “Things have a habit of working out, not necessarily in the way you expect, and you must never force them.” Her grounded approach served Carey and me well, because we both found it very disconcerting to be away from our parents, with the outbreak of war.

  On September 3, 1939, Great-aunt Bridget brought us down to the drawing room in Downie Park, where we listened to Neville Chamberlain’s declaration of war on the ancient wireless. There was something heavy and serious in the Prime Minister’s voice, which mirrored the atmosphere in the room. I stared at the carpet as I listened, not really knowing what was happening, wondering when we would be able to go home.

  There was a very different atmosphere when, in 1940, Princess Elizabeth directly addressed the children of Britain. Again, we sat on the carpet in the drawing room, huddled round the wireless craning our necks towards Princess Elizabeth’s voice, excited that we all knew her. It felt as if she was talking directly to us. At the end, Princess Elizabeth said, “My sister is by my side and we are both going to say goodnight to you. Come on, Margaret.” And Princess Margaret responded, “Goodnight, children.” We all answered back, thinking they could hear us, somehow imagining they were in the wireless. The Princesses were our heroines. So many children of our parents’ friends had been sent off to America in order to escape the war and there were the two Princesses, still in England, in as much danger as us all.

  The war meant that Carey and I and the Princesses were no longer in Norfolk together and the only time we saw them was when Carey, the Ogilvys, and I visited Glamis Castle—Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother’s family estate, where Princess Margaret had been born.

  Glamis is said to be the most haunted castle in Scotland and Princess Margaret knew every nook, cranny, and ghoul. As we were exploring the gro
unds, she told us stories about the ghosts, the gray lady who is said to haunt the chapel and the tongueless lady who runs across the lawn. The Ogilvys relished the stories and told their own, all about how there was a ghost at Cortachy, who would beat a drum whenever someone in the family died, leaving me relieved that Cortachy had been requisitioned. Just before we left, Princess Margaret took us down to see the train, which puffed along the edge of the grounds, standing on the bridge over the railway line, being enveloped in steam.

  Apart from that, we didn’t see them and life was quite limited. With no petrol and living in a big house far from the nearest town or city, we stayed within the grounds of Downie Park, only once going to Dundee when Uncle Joe took us to the theater.

  In the winter we would skate on the frozen lake, and when we weren’t having lessons with our governess, we would do our “war work,” collecting sphagnum moss for the Red Cross, who used it to help dress wounds, knitting gloves for the sailors on the minesweepers, and entertaining the Polish officers at Cortachy Castle by playing snakes and ladders on their beds and putting on amateur dramatics for them.

  Every afternoon, we would take our fresh air and exercise by walking down the long drive, then return to the house where a man from the nearby town of Kirriemuir would teach us to dance. Carey and I put on our black dancing shoes and in the vast dining room, with our cousin James, who was the same age as Carey and always wore a kilt, learned how to do the Highland Fling and the Sword Dance.

  James was not always so beguiling. He and Carey would regularly gang up on me. This might have been because I spent a great deal of time, rather pathetically, hugging trees, climbing up them, and pretending they were my friends. Once up them, however, I would be too frightened to come down, so Carey and James would stand below, teasing me with their particular catchphrase: “Cowardy, cowardy custard!” I had arrived at Downie Park a rather shy child, but I gradually came out of my shell. Being in a big pack of Ogilvys and part of a boisterous group soon toughened me up.

  My parents had sent our own governess to Downie, my mother telling me before she left for Egypt: “You’re now too old to have a nanny, so Daddy and I have chosen a governess for you called Miss Bonner and she is very nice, and you will be very happy with her.” Well, it turned out that Miss Bonner was not very nice. She was fairly all right with Carey, but really cruel to me. Every night, whatever I had done, however well I had behaved, she would punish me by tying my hands to the back of the bed and leaving me like that all night. I was too frightened of Miss Bonner to ask Carey to untie me, and Carey would have been too frightened to do it anyway. Both Carey and I suffered badly through this. I wanted to protect Carey, fearing Miss Bonner might do the same to her, so neither of us told anyone. While Miss Bonner did not do the same to my little sister, Carey witnessed this inexplicable behavior towards me and felt powerless that there was nothing she could do. Her distress would manifest itself in high temperatures linked to no specific illness.

  Because my mother had chosen Miss Bonner, I thought she knew what the governess was doing to me and didn’t mind, or even thought it was good for me. It caused me terrible confusion because I couldn’t understand why my parents would want me to be treated like that.

  Fortunately, Great-aunt Bridget’s Christian Science saved me. Eventually, Miss Bonner was sacked, not because of her ill treatment of me (which I am sure Great-aunt Bridget knew nothing about) but for being a Roman Catholic and taking me to Mass. There was nothing worse than Catholicism, as far as Great-aunt Bridget was concerned. When Miss Bonner left, I made a big fuss, pretending to be really upset that she was going, fearing she might somehow blame me and do something even more horrible.

  Miss Bonner left an invisible scar on me. To this day, I find it almost impossible to think about what she did to me. Years later, she sent me a card congratulating me on my engagement, which triggered the most unpleasant rush of memories and made me physically sick.

  Luckily, Miss Bonner was replaced with Miss Billy Williams, who was wonderful, although she looked rather daunting with a nose that was always running and one leg longer than the other so she had a limp. But she twinkled with kindness.

  The minute Billy Williams set foot in Carey’s and my lives, everything changed, and within days, we were devoted to her. I think she realized I’d had a difficult time with her predecessor, because she often gave me treats, taking me on fun days out. One of my favorite places was an Ogilvy shooting lodge, which was tucked into the hillside, surrounded by heather. She’d take us all off, walking along a pretty stream that ran through the bottom of the garden, stopping for a picnic, during which we would roll heather in a piece of newspaper and pretend to smoke it. We thought that was frightfully dashing.

  As the months turned to years we became more aware of the horrors of the war, overhearing conversations referring to the increasing attacks on Britain. Even though we had been sent up to Scotland to get away from danger, we weren’t far from Dundee, which was targeted heavily. In fact, there were more than five hundred German air raids on Scotland so we would probably have been safer staying in Norfolk. Once a German plane was shot down just above Tulcan lodge and, as a “great treat,” Billy Williams took me up to the wreckage to have a look. It was still smoking, although we saw no body, and I still have a piece of map I took from the plane, which was scattered in the heather.

  As Carey and I absorbed more information, mostly through the wireless that James’s nanny listened to tirelessly, we became convinced that Hitler and all his henchmen would come to England and each choose a stately home to live in. We had some idea that Hitler was going to Windsor and presumed, rather grandly, that either Himmler or Goering would choose Holkham. We weren’t far wrong. It transpired that the Nazis had indeed planned to take over the country estates, although Hitler had his sights on Blenheim.

  Carey and I, I suspect like many other imaginative children of the time, felt helpless in the face of the war. Knitting gloves and playing board games with Polish officers somehow didn’t feel helpful enough. Our father was fighting and our mother, we had been told, was doing “war work,” but we were doing nothing to stop Hitler.

  Discussing the dire situation, Carey and I became convinced Hitler was bound to visit Holkham at some point, so we decided that, somehow, we would go back there to kill him. In preparation for the assassination, we created a poison that we called “Hitler’s mess,” a collection of jam jars containing anything really disgusting—scraps of food and medicine, muddy water, and bits of fluff from the carpet. We hid it under our beds until it became so smelly that Billy Williams made us throw it away and, determined, we were forced to start again.

  We had decided to make Hitler fall in love with us, which, when I think about it now, was rather like the Mitfords. But, then, we were going to kill him—which, I suppose, was rather unlike the Mitfords. Of course, we had no real understanding of the situation and even less control over our own lives. That was why we devised our plan. We had heard he liked the Aryan look and we were both fair-haired, especially Carey, who was the blondest little thing with huge blue eyes. We thought we must take advantage of this in order to save Britain.

  We used to practice by pretending our teddy bear was Hitler, sidling up to him and saying things like, “How lovely to see you. We’re so pleased you’ve come to Holkham,” and “Do you enjoy staying here? We’ve got a lovely drink for you, Mr. Hitler—we’ve been saving it especially for you.” We didn’t quite think through what would happen if we did actually manage to kill Hitler, but then I suppose we didn’t get that far. We were absolutely convinced, however, that we could and would do it.

  In 1943, when I was ten and Carey was eight, our parents returned from Egypt and we returned to Norfolk. It was an underwhelming reunion—our parents were like strangers to us and, instead of a warm embrace after so many years, Carey and I clung to Billy Williams, hiding behind her, out of sight. It was only a day or so before our mother won back our affection, but it took longer to bui
ld a rapport with our father, who wasn’t as open and friendly and never hugged us like our mother.

  By then my great-grandfather had died and my grandfather had become 4th Earl of Leicester. For a little while we lived in the Red House in the village at Holkham, with one ancient maid nicknamed Speedy because she moved so slowly. Carey and I enjoyed living there, playing with the village boys in the wood near the house—we called it “the donkey wood.”

  Then we moved into the family wing at Holkham. It was the first time, apart from holidays, I had ever lived in the big house and it felt very exciting to know that it was now our official home.

  My grandfather liked to interest me and, wanting to teach me about Holkham’s treasures, put me in charge of airing the Codex Leicester, Leonardo da Vinci’s seventy-two-page manuscript, a study on water and stars. Once a fortnight, I would retrieve it from the butler’s pantry, where it was kept in a safe along with the Coke jewels and a Bible picture book.

  I used to lick my finger and spin through the pages, frowning down at Da Vinci’s mirror handwriting, studying the little drawings and diagrams with interest. Bought on the 1st Earl’s grand tour, it belonged to my family for at least two hundred and fifty years before, very sadly, my father had to sell it, needing money for the upkeep of the estate. Acquired at Christie’s by an American businessman, Armand Hammer, in the eighties, it was then sold on to Bill Gates in 1994 for $30.8 million, a record sum, making it the most valuable book in the world—and covered with my DNA.

  Life soon settled down at Holkham. My father continued his duties with the Scots Guards and my mother became head of North Norfolk’s Land Girls, directing agricultural tasks. Carey and I spent a lot of time playing in the house, making dens in the attic out of a collection of Old Masters deemed too louche for the walls of the state rooms, oblivious to the value and the subject.