The Queen Mother (107 page)

In Naples the King saw the Queen’s friend D’Arcy Osborne, who was still His Majesty’s envoy to the Holy See. He had not enjoyed the nine months of German occupation, he told the Queen. It was ‘terribly oppressive, never knowing if the Gestapo would not come at any moment’. He said that Yeats summed up his feelings about the war:

The King returned the day before the Queen’s birthday on 4 August; Queen Mary and other members of the family contributed to a Fabergé cornflower for her – she loved it and thought it ‘so beautifully unwarlike!’
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Queen Mary decided not to come over from Badminton to celebrate – she was concerned that if she met a robot plane the shock would give her an allergic reaction.
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The Queen thought she was probably wise – there were constant warnings and explosions on the afternoon of her birthday; she was longing to get the children away from Windsor ‘because life is rather un-normal, & though they are so good & composed, there is always the listening, & occasionally a leap behind the door, and it does become a strain’.
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Once more Balmoral beckoned. There they could relax after two such violent months and she could watch her daughters with ‘very bright eyes & pink cheeks again’. The liberation of Paris had begun but it was an end to the bombardment of London that she wanted. ‘I don’t think that anybody has any conception of the strain & horrible-ness of the whole thing, and people are so wonderful about it all. Up here, away from it, I find that I think all the time of those little rows
of houses, & everyone carrying on so splendidly amongst all the ruin & death – one feels almost conscience stricken to be so peaceful & quiet. It is marvellous too!’
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After Paris was freed in August 1944 and Churchill had had a joyous reception there, the Queen asked the Prime Minister, ‘Do you think that there is any chance of London being “Liberated” in the coming months? My heart aches for our wonderful brave people, they have been tried so high, & of course can go on, but it really is rather a bore to feel that one might be blown to pieces at any moment. There is no limit to their courage & cheerfulness and I long for them to have a lightening of their burden.’
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At the beginning of November 1944 the Queen learned that her father, who had been suffering from an attack of flu, was gravely ill. She immediately made plans to take the night train to Glamis, and telegraphed her younger brother David at the British Embassy in Washington: ‘FEAR NOT MUCH HOPE BUT HE IS VERY PEACEFUL BEST LOVE DARLING ELIZABETH’.
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David arranged to come at once, but Lord Strathmore died peacefully in his sleep on 7 November. His youngest son felt that in wartime circumstances he could not justify flying home ‘when all is over’.
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The Queen understood, but missed David greatly during the three sad days she spent at Glamis for the simple funeral.
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Lord Strathmore’s coffin, covered with a Union flag, was drawn to the burial ground on a farm cart by two horses while pipers from the Black Watch played ‘Flowers of the Forest’.
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The King walked behind the coffin with other men of the family; the Queen followed in a car with her sisters.

She had many letters, she told David, which stressed their father’s ‘kindness to one and all’.
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She thanked Churchill for his sympathetic letter, saying, ‘It is a very sad moment for us all, my father loved us, and we loved him, and it was so comforting for me to go home, and feel even now, with old age coming on, that I was a loved child – that has gone, but I am very grateful to have had it so long.’
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With the end of the war for the first time really in sight, the Queen was distressed by the decision to disband one of her favourite wartime institutions, the Home Guard. She saw it as emblematic of the ‘good brave self sacrificing British people’,
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working together in their amateur but committed manner to defeat the evils of fascism. After a visit to one battalion in July 1944, she wrote to the commanding officer, ‘As I went down the ranks I thought with pride & gratitude of
the splendid spirit of loyalty and determination which brought the Home Guard into being during those critical days of 1940.’
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The King broadcast thanks to the Home Guard for their ‘steadfast devotion’ which had ‘helped much to ward off the danger of invasion’.
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A
T THE END
of 1944 the Queen began an association which gave her and others pleasure for the rest of her life – she became a bencher of the Middle Temple, one of the four Inns of Court, the professional associations to which every English barrister must belong. Since the foundation of the Inns in the Middle Ages, no monarch or consort had ever joined any of them, and no woman had ever before been a member of the parliament of an Inn.

Like many of the historic buildings in London, the Middle Temple had been badly damaged by bombing. The Queen’s installation took place on 12 December 1944, in the New Parliament Chamber, whose windows had been blown out. One light was suspended from the ceiling by its flex. But good cheer was had nonetheless. The tables were set in the form of an E and were laid with the Middle Temple silver which, like the contents of the wine cellar, had survived.
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The simple menu – Clear Soup, Roast Turkey, Apple Tart and Cheese and Biscuits – was made more memorable by Pol Roger 1928, Château Margaux 1924, Taylor’s Port 1912 and 1878 brandy. In her speech the Queen displayed a sense of history:

Our walls may crumble, she continued, but more precious were the unshaken and unshakeable virtues and graces of the Inn. In particular ‘the honourable administration of the Law and the unswerving impartiality between rich and poor’.
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In response, the Master Treasurer
rose and toasted ‘Our new Bencher the Queen’. For the rest of her life she rarely missed the annual dinner of the Inn.

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T
HE PANTOMIME
season at Windsor was upon them again and, the Queen wrote, ‘Windsor is ringing with words like lights, cut it, grease paint, Mother Hubbard, finale, opening chorus etc.’
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They called this pantomime
Old Mother Red Riding Boots
and performed it in the Waterloo Chamber just before Christmas. The King thought the 1944 pantomime was ‘better than ever & [the Princesses] both did their parts very well & enjoyed them’. This year, as he prepared his Christmas broadcast, he noted, ‘I did not have Logue with me. I knew I did not need his help.’
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As the German armies retreated there were increasing anxieties about the wreckage that would be left behind, and about the march of Soviet communism westwards. Churchill was especially worried about Poland, on whose behalf Britain had originally gone to war, and Greece. In Athens, after the flight of the Nazi occupiers, growing violence between communists and royalists filled the streets. The Queen believed that such violence was perhaps inevitable given what had happened – ‘one feels that occupation of a country by the Germans leaves a terrible legacy of anarchy & cruelty & a weakening of moral forces –
Indeed
the Nazis are the forces of Evil. May the coming year see the end of this ghastly struggle & a return to law & order in Europe is my fervent prayer.’
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She was dismayed by the way in which the press and the BBC appeared to support the communist side in Greece. ‘One could hardly
believe
’, she wrote to Queen Mary, ‘that the Press and intellectuals of the socialist party could be so blind as to back up a gang of bandits who wanted to seize power by force. We have suffered so much in the fight for what is called Freedom, it was very sad that at this moment people could be so misled as to what freedom means. It certainly doesn’t mean government by tommy gun.’
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The Queen was able, by early 1945, to spend more time writing to and seeing her friends, though she found letters difficult. ‘There is so little to write about except war,’ she said.
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Among the friends of whom she had not seen enough was Dick Molyneux, co-founder of the Windsor Wets. He wrote to her in the middle of March and she replied immediately:

On 12 April 1945 the King and Queen were appalled to hear of the death of President Roosevelt from a cerebral haemorrhage. Queen Mary called it ‘a positive catastrophe’,
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and the King replied that the news had been ‘a great shock to me & we shall feel his loss very much.’
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Roosevelt was succeeded by the then little-known Vice-President, Harry Truman.

By now, the war was nearly won. London was ‘liberated’ as the Queen had asked: all the doodlebug launch sites across the Channel had been captured or destroyed from the air; the mobile launchers of the V2 rocket bombs, whose trajectory could not be intercepted and whose death toll had been even higher, were also rendered ineffective. Mussolini was seized by Italian partisans on 27 April and executed the next day; two days later Hitler committed suicide in the squalor of his Berlin bunker. Victory was finally announced on 8 May 1945. In his diary the King wrote, ‘The day we have been longing for has arrived at last, & we can look back with thankfulness to God that our tribulation is over.’
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The 8th was a Tuesday and after Churchill’s weekly lunch with the King the Prime Minister returned to 10 Downing Street to put the finishing touches to his victory speech, to be broadcast by the BBC and relayed by loudspeakers around Whitehall that evening. It was short and resolute, and he ended with the words: ‘the evil doers lie prostrate before us.’ The crowds in the streets gasped at this phrase. ‘Advance Britannia!’ the Prime Minister shouted.

The streets of every town in the country were filled with singing, dancing, frolicking people. Tens of thousands of them gathered in the Mall in front of Buckingham Palace. The Palace balcony had been
surveyed to ensure that it was still structurally sound after all the bombs that had exploded near by. That evening the King, the Queen and the Princesses appeared on the balcony – for the first time together. Huge happy crowds roared for the family to come back out again and again. Among the throng was Noël Coward: ‘The King and Queen came out on the balcony, looking enchanting. We all roared ourselves hoarse … I suppose this is the greatest day in our history.’
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The Princesses begged their parents to allow them into the throng to celebrate. The King agreed. ‘Poor darlings, they have never had any fun yet,’ he wrote in his diary.
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With a party of young officers, the Princesses danced through the city unrecognized as hundreds of thousands of people cheered and cheered their parents.

The King was exhausted and in his victory broadcast he stumbled over his words more than usual. In common with millions of his subjects, he felt the strain of the war terribly. He looked shattered. He and the Queen found all the expressions of gratitude and praise for them overwhelming. They were especially moved by the tribute Churchill paid them.
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In a speech to the Commons, the Prime Minister was lyrical in his description of all that the King had done to help sustain the war effort. He then told the House that it would be ‘altogether unfitting’ if he did not also speak of the King’s ‘gracious consort, the Queen’. She, he said, ‘has been everywhere with him to scenes of suffering and disaster, to hospitals, to places shattered the day before by some devastating explosion, to see the bereaved, the sufferers and the wounded, and I am sure that many an aching heart has found some solace in her gracious smile.’
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The Queen summed up her own feelings in a letter to Osbert Sitwell: