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extrovert personality, she had found few problems in mixing with her contemporaries in
a new environment despite having been brought up and educated at Buckingham Palace
by Mispy, and having her only contact with girls her own age through the Buckingham
Palace Brownie Pack. As a child she had been a tomboy uninterested in dolls – once
when a visitor had happened to see a doll in her pram and asked its name, the Princess
had glared and said abruptly, ‘No name.’ ‘Having an elder brother,’ she later said, ‘I was
rather more interested in playing the sort of games that he was playing…’ She was
competent, confident, athletic. Her father had taught her to swim, her mother to ride;
she had the natural affinity with animals, particularly dogs and horses, which her
mother had. A revealing set of photographs shows the young Princess handling an
unruly young calf with ease, while her worried-looking older brother tussles ineptly with
his animal at the end of a rope. As the second child and a girl, she never felt the same
pressures upon her which her brother experienced as heir to the throne, but equally, she
told an interviewer, she ‘always accepted the role of being second in everything from
quite an early age’. While she may have accepted that role in the family hierarchy, that
did not mean that she did so in her daily life. She was fiercely competitive and, as far as
her family was concerned, a rebel like her father had been, ‘naughty but not nasty’, as
his Gordonstoun headmaster had put it. ‘As a child and up to my teens’, she said, ‘I don’t
think I went along with the family bit, not until later than anyone else. I know its value
now but I don’t think I did up to my middle teens…’ Later she was grateful: ‘The
greatest advantage of my entire life is the family I grew up in. I’m eternally grateful for
being able to grow up in the sort of atmosphere that was given to me – and to have it
continue now that I’m grown up.’ 6
Elizabeth’s relationship with Anne was an exceptionally easy one, as her own
relationship with her mother had been. Since she had been able to accommodate her
husband’s forceful personality, she had few problems with her daughter, who was in
many ways almost his clone; there was none of the conflict that characterizes many
mother-daughter relationships. There was mutual admiration and respect for each
other’s abilities and shared interests. Like her mother and – to a lesser extent – her
father, Anne had a passion for horses. Charles later claimed that he often felt left out at
home when his mother, father and sister discussed the finer points of equitation or
breeding and that they laughed at him when he made some elementary mistake in the
subject. ‘Oh, Anne’s so practical,’ Elizabeth would say delightedly, ‘she always knows
what to do’, when one of the dogs was hurt. They even owned the same dogs; Anne had
a black labrador and a corgi – a male refugee from the royal pack which was exclusively
female. The relationship with her father was equally easy; Anne fulfilled in many ways
the son’s role to him but without the underlying element of male competitiveness. It was
she, rather than Charles, who enjoyed sailing with him at Cowes on Bluebottle and
Bloodhound.
Like her father, Anne had leadership qualities; in her last year she was made captain
of her House, and her headmistress’s description of her attitude might as easily have
been applied to him. Anne, she said, was capable and able to ‘exert her authority in a