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The King and Queen were grooming Elizabeth for her future position. When
important visitors came to lunch at Buckingham Palace, Elizabeth would be there, urged
on by her mother to speak to her neighbour, usually some important ambassador or war
leader. Eleanor Roosevelt, invited by the Queen to observe the part played by British
women in the war effort, came to stay at Buckingham Palace in October 1942 and met
the sixteen-year-old Elizabeth at family tea. The President’s wife, no mean judge of
character, was impressed, writing that she was ‘quite serious and with a great deal of
character and personality. She asked me a number of questions about life in the United
States and they were serious questions.’ 7
There were outings such as a day at Elstree where Noël Coward’s war film, In Which
We Serve, was in production. Mountbatten masterminded the party, taking his younger
daughter, Pamela, along with the royal family. A rocking stage was set up for the deck
scenes on board HMS Torrin, based on Mountbatten’s ship, HMS Kelly, sunk under him in
the Battle of Crete. It was all too realistic for most of the party, particularly for the two
youngest, Pamela and Margaret. ‘It was a toss-up who was going to be sick first,’ Lady
Pamela recalled. ‘It was too awful, worse than the real sea.’ On another more formal
occasion, Elizabeth accompanied her mother to a poetry-reading in aid of the Free
French organized by the Queen’s friend Osbert Sitwell, which ended with a display of
‘tired and emotional’ behaviour by one of the poets, Lady Dorothy Wellesley. According
to Edith Sitwell:
Lady Peel (Beatrice Lillie) tried to enfold her in a ju-jitsu grip and hold her down to her seat, Stephen
Spender… seeing her wander outside, tried to knock her down and sit on her face, Raymond Mortimer…
induced her to take his arm and go into Bond Street where she promptly sat down on the pavement, banging
her stick and using frightful language about A the Queen and B Me… she smacked Harold Nicolson.
Writing to thank Osbert Sitwell for a book he had sent her for her birthday, Elizabeth
politely told him how much she had enjoyed the ‘Poets Reading’.
Nineteen forty-two, the year of Elizabeth’s sixteenth birthday, was also the year of her
confirmation on 1 March, officiated by her grandfather’s old friend, Cosmo Lang,
Archbishop of Canterbury, who had also christened her. Queen Mary came up from her
wartime home at Badminton for the ceremony. There was no doubt which of the two
Princesses she preferred. ‘Lilibet much grown, very pretty eyes and complexion, pretty
figure. Margaret very short, intelligent face but not really pretty.’ Lady Airlie made the
by now commonplace comparison with Queen Victoria. ‘The carriage of her head was
unequalled, and there was about her that indescribable something which Queen Victoria
had.’ She also formally registered under the wartime youth service scheme at the local
Labour Exchange at 11 a.m. on Saturday, 25 April 1942, and was given a registration
card, E. D. 431. 8 In honour of her sixteenth birthday she was made Colonel of the
Grenadier Guards in place of her great-great-uncle, the Duke of Connaught, who had
died that year. This meant a great deal to her; as she told Osbert Sitwell, one of the
birthday presents she had particularly appreciated was from the Grenadiers: ‘the