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and two months, saw them for the first time for six months and on the same day too she
was held up for public inspection by cheering crowds on the same centre balcony at
Buckingham Palace which was to be the stage for so many public appearances during
her lifetime. She had been separated from her parents for almost half her life, a royal
pattern which was to be imposed on her own young children when she became Queen.
On their return the Yorks moved into 145 Piccadilly, the house in which Elizabeth was
to spend the next ten years of her life. This house too would disappear, this time as a
result of a direct hit by a German bomb during the Second World War. In 1927 it was a
plain, stone-fronted five-storeyed house on the north side of Piccadilly looking south
over the trees of Green Park to the grey bulk of Buckingham Palace. No. 145 was bigger
than Bruton Street; apart from the usual reception rooms, it had a ballroom, library and
conservatory, twenty-five bedrooms and an electric lift. The Yorks’ staff included a
butler, Mr Ainslie, an under-butler, two footmen, a housekeeper, Mrs Evans, and the
cook, Mrs Macdonald. There was also a steward’s room boy, whose duty it was to serve
the meals to the senior servants, three kitchenmaids, a dresser for the Duchess, a valet
for the Duke, an ‘odd-job’ man, a night-watchman, an RAF orderly and a Boy Scout to
operate the telephone. Elizabeth moved into a nursery floor at the top of the house with
Allah Knight, and the nursery maid, a young Scots girl, named Margaret MacDonald,
known as ‘Bobo’, who would remain one of the people closest to Elizabeth for more than
sixty years. Here Elizabeth lived her serene, orderly life, her toys carefully arranged in
glass-fronted cabinets, her toy ponies in a row in the passage outside the nursery. At
night she folded her clothes on a chair with her shoes lined up neatly underneath. Lady
Airlie’s present to her for her third Christmas was a dustpan and brush, not something
which most children would regard with enthusiasm. A sickly contemporary description
shows her as a good little girl, unquestioningly obeying the rules:
And so, when Princess Elizabeth’s nurse, descending to the morning room or the drawing room, says in her
quiet tones, ‘I think it is bed time now, Elizabeth,’ there are no poutings or protests, just a few last joyous
skips and impromptu dance steps, a few last minute laughs at Mummy’s delicious bed time jokes, and then
Princess Elizabeth’s hand slips into her nurse’s hand, and the two go off gaily together across the deep
chestnut pile of the hall carpet to the accommodating lift, which in two seconds has whisked them up to the
familiar dear domain which is theirs to hold and to share. 1
A more perceptive observer, Winston Churchill, met Elizabeth for the first time at
Balmoral in September 1928 when she was two and a half years old. ‘[She] is a
character,’ he told his wife, Clementine. ‘She has an air of authority and reflectiveness
astonishing in an infant.’ 2
The ‘infant’ was already the subject of intense public attention. Aged only three she
made the cover of Time as a fashion setter; children all over the world were dressed in
yellow instead of the usual pink or blue when it was revealed that yellow was the
predominant colour in her clothes and the decoration of her nursery. Her parents were
taken aback by the universal passion for Elizabeth. In the autumn of 1928 the Duchess
of York, who was in Edinburgh on an official visit without her daughter, reported to