38656356325923

finding it impossible to discuss emotional issues. In the stiff-upper-lip tradition of her
family, she regarded displays of emotion or complaints as weakness. ‘Never explain,
never complain’ could have been the family motto. When a dog belonging to one of her
Private Secretaries died, she wrote a four-page letter of condolence, but when one of her
former Private Secretaries died, she could not bring herself to write to his widow
although the man had served her loyally for many years. It was not callousness but an
inability to express, and an unwillingness to face up to, deep emotion. By contrast,
Margaret, to whom the death of their father had come as the greatest blow of her life,
was always ready with sympathy in such circumstances; when the father of one of her
ladies-in-waiting died, Margaret’s was one of the two most touching letters of sympathy
which his daughter received. Elizabeth’s children (and other people) did not confide in
her, partly because she was the Queen and partly because of a reluctance to break
through her reserve. She herself would sometimes complain that her children ‘never
talked to her’, seemingly not realizing that perhaps the initiative could lie with her. The
situation was not made any easier for her by the fact that her husband and her son did
not get on and that she tended to agree with Philip in his criticism of Charles.
In the circumstances Charles turned to people other than his parents. He was fond of
but not close to his sister, who was too like his father for comfort. He had a surrogate
mother in his former nanny, Mabel Anderson, an elder sister (or, as one relation
described her, ‘a female Mountbatten’) in Lady Susan Hussey, who was only eleven
years older than he was, and, the most important of all his relationships, a surrogate
father in Mountbatten. Mountbatten by this time was coming to occupy in the Prince’s
life the place of both his father and his mother. His had been the influential voice in the
plotting of the Prince’s education, something in which Elizabeth, unsure of herself
because of her own lack of life experience in the field, had acted passively, leaving the
initiative to her husband and his uncle. After Cambridge, it had been Mountbatten who
pressed upon the Prince the importance of joining the Navy rather than any other
service. Philip, naturally, who had regarded his period in the Navy as the happiest time
of his life, was keen to have his son follow in his footsteps. He took the greatest trouble
to consult senior naval officers on the subject and to report the results of these meetings
in handwritten notes to Charles, but it was Mountbatten, rather than his father, who
had urgently lobbied the Prince to choose the Navy above the other services, even while
Charles was still at Gordonstoun. He could spend some time in the other services if
necessary, Mountbatten argued, but ‘you must have a “mother service” that you really
belong to and where you can have a reasonable career. Your father, Grandfather, and
both your Great Grandfathers had a distinguished career in the Royal Navy. If you
follow in their footsteps this would be very popular…’ 3
Mountbatten enjoyed illuminating for the Prince the history of his family and the
ways of Whitehall. With his career record, notably as the last Viceroy of India and Chief
of the Defence Staff, he was, as Charles’s biographer wrote, uniquely placed to instruct
the Prince with authority and intimacy about the governance of Britain and to help him
interpret the duties and opportunities which faced him. ‘He communicated his aperçus in