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valley; up on the moors the air is fresh and there are views of the North Cairngorms
with patches of permanent snow gleaming on the mountain-tops. The whole place is
dominated by the brooding, purple hill of Lochnagar, with its dark upland lake.
Victoria’s influence still reigns over the interior of the castle. Although Queen Mary
banished the ginger paint which had covered much of the panelling in Victoria’s day, the
walls were still hung with beige on white flocked trellis paper with the old Queen’s
cypher ‘VRI’. Upstairs the bedroom furnishings remained more or less the same. Tartan
reigned over the linoleum, rugs, curtains, the old-fashioned bedroom china of jug, basin,
soap-dish on the washhand stand, dishes and pin boxes on the dressing-tables. The
tartan and thistle chintzes made for the queen were still in use. The castle featured
innumerable oil paintings and prints of Highland scenes and wildlife by Victoria and
Albert’s favourite artist, Sir Edwin Landseer. Antlers protruded from every available
space not occupied by Landseers or by solemn portraits of bearded ghillies who had
served the family in the past. In the front hall a full-sized marble statue of Prince Albert,
creator and presiding spirit of the place, stood wearing a slightly pained expression.
Outside, the gardens were dotted with statues placed there by Victoria: a life-size bronze
boar, a chamois poised on a rock over a fountain and, of course, ones of Victoria and
Albert themselves, a Jubilee present to the Queen from the Balmoral tenantry.
Balmoral was, and is, essentially a holiday home for the royal family. The family
always spent most of August (arriving in time for the opening of the grouse-shooting
season on the ‘Glorious Twelfth’), all of September and the early part of October at
Balmoral. They left with a sense of great regret: ‘soon we must leave this peaceful place
and return to London,’ the Queen wrote to Duff Cooper at the beginning of October. ‘It
is so lovely now, the birches are turning from silver to gold, the air is cold & the sun
shines, so that I am sorry to go.’ The King was in his element out ‘on the hill’ stalking or
spending the day on the grouse moor – he was an expert shot. The Queen had been
taught to shoot by her brothers, but preferred fishing quietly beside the Dee to the
discomforts of days out on the moors, scratched by the heather and deafened by the
guns. For the children there would be picnics, often at the Glassalt Shiel, a simple
granite double-bowed and gabled lodge built by Victoria at the head of the peat-brown
Loch Muick beside a rushing burn in a wood of pines and larches where there was
always the fresh wind-borne smell of pine. At the castle tea was an occasion with
shrimps, hot sausage-rolls and Scottish specialities – scones, baps and bannocks – laid
out on a table in the drawing-room. At night, after dinner, which almost inevitably
featured roast grouse, the King’s seven pipers wearing the Balmoral tartan would march
playing their bagpipes through the hall and twice round the dining-room table, watched
from above by the Princesses in their dressing-gowns. Elizabeth had friends of her own
age there, children of courtiers who spent their holidays in houses on the Balmoral
estate. In the years before the war they started their own magazine, The Snapdragon,
edited by Winifred Hardinge, daughter of Alec, sub-edited by Joey Legh’s daughter,
Diana, and handwritten on lined paper stapled together. Elizabeth was a contributor;
one issue contained a piece by her, significantly describing her experiences looking out