38656356325923

worrying… Now we have to fight a new attack on London… On Sunday in Church I weakly let a tear leave
my eye thinking of the sorrows of so many good & brave people, & feeling unhappy for them, & as I did so, I
felt a small hand in mine & the anxious blue eye of Margaret Rose wondering what was the matter. I
remembered with a dreadful pang that I did exactly the same thing to my mother, when I was just about
Margaret’s age. I remembered so vividly looking up at my mother in church & seeing the tears on her cheeks,
& wondering how to comfort her… she had then had 4 sons in the army… I could not bear to think that my
daughter should have to go through all this in another 25 years… 12
Among the ‘precious people’ killed in Normandy was a friend of the Queen’s, the artist
Rex Whistler.
It was not until the spring of 1945, just before her nineteenth birthday, that Elizabeth
was at last allowed ‘out’ to join the Auxiliary Territorial Service, always known as the
ATS, as No. 230873 Second Subaltern Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor. Much as she
adored her father, Elizabeth found his protectiveness frustrating. It was as if he could
not bear her out of his sight, as if he wanted to preserve their happy family life in aspic,
prolonging her childhood for as long as he could. Most of Elizabeth’s friends and
contemporaries were working – as drivers, canteen helpers, secretaries. She longed to go
out and acquire a skill as they had, to ‘do her bit’ for the war effort. At last she had been
allowed to enrol on an NCO’s cadre course for the ATS and she was determined to start
on time even though she was just recovering from a bad attack of mumps. She spent a
good deal of time the day before the course started on Friday, 23 March, polishing the
buttons on her new uniform. Ugly and unflattering as it was – a khaki cloth-belted tunic
and skirt worn with khaki stockings and regulation flat heavy brown shoes – she
cherished it as a symbol of freedom and an adventure into the outside world. For some
time past, Junior Commandant Violet Wellesley (known as ‘Auntie Vi’ to her
subordinates, as Elizabeth was to discover) had been coming over to Windsor to teach
Elizabeth to drive in preparation for the course, which was intended to make her not
only an expert driver but also capable of maintaining the various vehicles she would
have to drive. On the morning of the 23rd, Elizabeth, buttons gleaming, presented
herself to her father for inspection. Margaret was envious and ‘madly cross’; once again,
as Elizabeth used to complain to Crawfie, ‘Margaret always wants what I’ve got.’
At Camberley the eleven women who had been told by the Commandant that they had
had ‘the honour to be picked to attend a Cadre Course with HRH the Princess Elizabeth
for three weeks’ awaited her arrival with as much eagerness and curiosity as she must
have felt herself. It was the first time in history, they had been told, that a woman
member of the royal family had ever attended a course with ‘other people’ and they
were under strict instructions for security reasons not to reveal the identity of the new
subaltern on the course. Elizabeth had led such a secluded life since the beginning of the
war that no one was sure quite what she looked like. ‘Quite striking,’ one girl noted in
the diary she kept of the course, ‘short pretty brown crisp curly hair. Lovely grey-blue
eyes, and an extremely charming smile, and she uses lipstick!’ 13 Both as Princess and as
Queen, Elizabeth was and is fascinated by ‘ordinary people’. Her own world was