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willing to play with him – absolutely perfect.’ She treasured her children’s childhood and
was devastated when it was discovered that Charles’s nanny had accidentally thrown
away all the letters she had written to him when he was small. Charles too loved babies
– ‘I wish I had one of these,’ he said wistfully one day on a visit to his brothers’ nursery.
Elizabeth has a great sense of family duty. She has been very generous to Philip’s
relations, his sisters and their families and to his mother, Princess Alice, who spent the
last three years of her life at Buckingham Palace until her death in 1969. After the war,
Princess Alice had started a nursing order of nuns in Athens. The order was perennially
short of money and dependent on rich contributors, Elizabeth among them. When
Princess Alice was ill in Athens, her daughters tried to persuade her to leave and go to
London, but she adamantly refused until told that ‘Lilibet said she should go’. ‘Oh well,
in that case let’s go tomorrow,’ she replied. Elizabeth was, Princess Alice’s daughter,
Princess George of Hanover, said, ‘absolutely divine’ to her. 9 She enjoyed talking to her
mother-in-law, who had a sharp intelligence and a great knowledge of family history
and relationships. Princess Alice had been born at Windsor and remembered Queen
Victoria well – she was eighteen when the old Queen died. Princess Alice had a
temperament somewhat like Philip’s. ‘They were both undemonstrative, and would talk
quite roughly to each other,’ a courtier said, ‘but there was a deep bond.’ She used to
treat her brother, Mountbatten, like ‘that naughty little boy’. She was great friends with
Prince Edward, who could shout at the right tone so that she could hear him. ‘He used to
sit on the edge of her bed and she would read books to him and play Halma.’ Unworldly
to the end, she was determined to be buried in Jerusalem, ‘because it’s the centre of the
Christian world’. When her children protested that it was too far away and that it would
be difficult for them to visit her grave, she replied briskly, ‘Not at all, there’s a very good
bus service from London.’ Elizabeth has a reputation for meanness, but it is thrift rather
than miserliness. She hates waste and the stories about her going round Buckingham
Palace turning out the lights and sending Prince Charles out to hunt for a dropped dog
lead are illustrations of that. She also hates to give things away or to pay too much for
anything (a royal trait), but when it comes to supporting her extended family she is
generous. ‘She pays for everyone,’ a courtier said. ‘The Kents and people like that.’
‘Really,’ Elizabeth used to complain wryly, ‘what with my mother and her castles and
my mother-in-law and her nunneries…’
Cautiously through the 1960s Elizabeth was making moves towards healing the breach
with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. The situation was a tricky one for her: as the
sovereign she could not approve of the Abdication; as the loyal daughter of King George
VI and Queen Elizabeth, brought up to disapprove of Uncle David and particularly of
Wallis Simpson, she could not welcome them with open arms without upsetting her
mother, nor did she particularly want to do so. But Uncle David was still ‘Family’ with a
capital ‘F’ and the continuance of the Windsor feud was doing the royal family no good
in the eyes of the public, a majority of whom were now too young to remember the
events of 1936. A poll organized by the Express in 1962 at the time of the Windsors’
twenty-fifth wedding anniversary showed an overwhelming percentage in favour of the