The Final Curtsey (13 page)

There were no complaints or embarrassing dramas when Queen Elizabeth came. I’m sure she would have much preferred to have spent a quiet weekend at Royal Lodge rather than becoming the
pivotal point of a sojourn in our happy go lucky household. I would do my best to make sure that everything ran like clockwork. I would go through every detail of the menus for every meal with Mrs
Mallett, attempting to cover every eventuality, and so before my aunt arrived I would bid Mrs Mallett farewell and say, with feeling: ‘See you when it’s all over.’ However despite
all my rehearsals, I still managed to receive my aunt wearing gumboots. Mrs Mallet was horrified, but she recovered enough to have a lovely time, entertaining policemen, footmen and all the
guests.

Once when Queen Elizabeth was entertained at Uplowman, it was midsummer and the sheep were making a lot of noise, baa-ing their heads off. In those days we followed the convention of the ladies
leaving the gentlemen to their port after dinner. Queen Elizabeth thought they were lingering far too long and marshalled us women outside the dining-room window, conducting them in a baa-baa
chorus. As the tempo increased in volume the tippling men took the hint and they joined us in the drawing room for coffee.

I have been assured by my children that I am a consummate hostess even when disaster looms. There was one mid-winter occasion when our overworked heating system blew up. The electric fuse box
near the kitchen burst into flames and we had to dial 999. The fire brigade arrived and marched through the house in huge muddy boots and quenched the blaze. There was no light and on the heels of
the departing firemen the guests arrived for the weekend. We received them by candlelight. We had, of course, dressed for dinner and managed to reorganise the menu. The first course passed in
relative peace and then the kitchen hatch opened and Mrs Mallet announced that the cowman’s wife had arrived to say that she thought her husband was dead and please, could Mr Rhodes go over
and see if he was actually dead. Mr Rhodes declined and told the gardener Mr Mallet to go, as he’d been in the war — so had Denys for that matter but he chose to overlook that
qualification — and would know if he was dead. Ten minutes later the hatch opened again and the message was that Mr Mallet thought the cowman was dead, although he had twitched a couple of
times. The final request, death having been established, was for Mr Rhodes to go and lay the poor man out. This pleasure, I’m afraid, Denys also declined. The awful thing was that the whole
macabre sequence was unbelievably funny and our rather ribald weekend guests were convulsed, save one of them, Lady Waverley, the recently widowed wife of Sir John Anderson, the Second World War
Home Secretary, who had been responsible for planting corrugated-iron air-raid shelters the length and breadth of the land, known as Anderson shelters, who seemed merely bemused. She wrote to me
afterwards saying that perhaps she had been taking death too seriously — which was very tactful of her. Queen Elizabeth would have revelled in the situation if she had been there.

We both used to be asked to Balmoral and luckily Denys took to stalking and enjoyed it as much as I did. We never went out together, but stalked on different beats. The thrill of a successful
shot after a long wet crawl through the heather was an exceptional pleasure. Having shot my first stag in my teens and my last in my seventies, I believe that I have terminated the lives of around
350 stags which needed to be culled. One evening while staying at the Castle, we were sitting in the drawing room with Princess Margaret. ‘How is your book getting on?’ she asked Denys.
‘It’s nearly finished,’ he replied, ‘but I desperately need a title.’ At which point a voice behind us said: ‘And I cannot think of a reason for giving you
one.’ The Queen had entered the room unobserved: this was an example of her quick repartee.

As well as crossing the Scottish border annually, we crossed many others as well, including the small country of Sikkim, where we were asked if we could be guardians to the two young grandsons
of the Maharajah, who were due to go to Harrow when their prep-school days ended. We gladly agreed: they were roughly the same age as our two girls and this increased the family to six. When they
arrived we had to give them guidance on Western habits and etiquette. We found them somewhat out of touch with so-called civilisation and we even had to teach them how to use the lavatory, they
having been used to the local Indian arrangements. They returned to Sikkim for the long summer holidays but stayed with us for the Christmas and Easter holidays.

The eldest boy, Tenzing, was sadly killed in a car crash when he was only twenty-six years old. The younger brother, Wanchuk, was enthroned as the token 13th King of Sikkim after the death of
his father from cancer in 1982, but was powerless because his kingdom had been subsumed into the Indian sub-continent by Indira Ghandi. He was a very devout Buddhist and had responsibility for
religious matters. He was a really nice man and was inclined to disappear on three-year-long meditations living in a cave in the mountains. After they had been with us for some time, they asked if
they could call me Mummy. I thought this might be rather confusing, so we settled on Auntie. Years later, when I was a Lady-in-Waiting to Queen Elizabeth, I met the present Dalai Lama, who was full
of praise for Wanchuk’s spirituality and dedication.

In the real world we needed extra help with our acres, but this was not affordable, so in 1973 we took the dreaded decision to sell Uplowman, where we had been so happy. There were other dark
clouds on the horizon. From the earliest days of our marriage Denys would often predict that he wouldn’t make ‘old bones’. In 1965 he had a heart attack and spent quite a long
time in hospital. My nicotine intake doubled during that time and became even greater when he came home. He had been forbidden to smoke any more, but I still needed to and took to hiding my
cigarettes inside my palm or alternatively having to visit the loo more than I normally would, for a quick drag. Towards the end of his recovery from his heart attack he sank into a very deep
depression. It was an awful time and lasted for almost a year. He couldn’t face seeing people, even his nearest and dearest. I vividly remember the moment his illness began to recede, when we
were driving up to Scotland. At one overnight stop, after dinner, we went for a short walk and suddenly he laughed. It was a blissful sound, not heard for at least a year.

Tenzing and Wanchuk Namgyal

I found that the only way I could cope was to live life as we had before the blow struck, at least as far as it was humanly possible. We were four or five hours driving time from either of our
families and I wanted to move closer to London. Money was limited and finding a suitable property was difficult. We looked at various houses to rent but they were all much too expensive. At this
stage Denys was comparatively well and he insisted that I should go as usual in October to Balmoral. Dear Mrs Mallett came in to look after him while I was away. I have related how the Queen
offered us my present home in the Great Park at Windsor. It was positively the most wonderful thing to happen. The rent was within our scope, and it meant that we would be near my sister Jean, and
my aunt, Queen Elizabeth.

I am everlastingly grateful to the Queen for enabling it to happen, and I have lived there longer than I have anywhere else, surrounded by the memorabilia collected during a long and happy life.
Every photograph, every painting, every piece of furniture tells a story. My immediate surroundings are not in any way grand, although there is grandeur up the road. You can’t see the castle
from where I live, but it’s good to know that it’s there, over the horizon and inhabited by people who have been so kind to me.

We took possession of the Garden House in April 1981 and in my efforts to make life relatively normal I took Denys to a little cottage we had previously rented at Cap d’Antibes. Shaun
Plunket, younger brother of Patrick, and his wife came to stay, and I hope that it made Denys feel that life could go on and that one could still have happy moments. We had a quiet peaceful time,
lay in the sun, and shopped in the local market.

Back home, Denys was admitted to the Princess Christian Hospital in Windsor so that his condition could be monitored. He slowly began to drift away. I sat with him, held his hand and kept
assuring him that I was there. He would nod, without opening his eyes, and then suddenly he wasn’t there any more. He died in October 1981. It was the end of thirty-one very special and
loving years. But what is love and how on earth does one know whether this one person is the one you wish to spend the whole of the rest of your life with? It is a terrifyingly difficult question.
But when the love arrow strikes there is only a complete certainty that it is the right and natural thing to do. Luckily I can look back on three decades of unalloyed happiness. Even after my many
years of widowhood I can relive countless happy memories. Not least of these are, of course, the children. They are my pride and joy, although it is now funny to experience a role reversal in which
they now look after me and try to tell me what I can and can’t do, just occasionally generating a spark of rebellion.

Family is supremely important. I never knew my paternal grandparents as they died before I was born. My father had one brother and one sister who never married. So during my childhood there were
no relations on my father’s side of the family. But my Strathmore grandmother had ten children, so there were a great many cousins from that clan. Fortunately for me, my mother’s
youngest sister’s eldest child, Princess Elizabeth, coincided almost exactly in age with me, my mother’s youngest. It has been my greatest good fortune to have been with my cousin
through her childhood years and later as Queen. We are now both old ladies, but she is an amazing person in so many ways and I am sure that history will mark her out as an exceptional
sovereign.

She has led her country unerringly through several difficult periods. She is pragmatic and able to see clearly what line to take when others have been less sure. I admire her with all my heart.
But she is also a human being, a mother, daughter and sister and I fully understand the hurt that must have been caused by the marriage failures of her three eldest children. I only hope the nation
does too. I clearly believe that after sixty years of being Sovereign, she has seldom put a foot wrong. She has always put the good of the nation first and it is reassuring to know that we will
have her son and grandson following in her footsteps.

CHAPTER SIX

The wild, the remote and an element of danger have always beckoned, but I never imagined that when Denys and I received an invitation to the wedding of the Crown Prince of
Sikkim in the Spring of 1963 it would set off a chain of adventures which would lead to us being arrested and detained in a very nasty coup in the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan — or that our
companion in this frightening episode would be Shirley MacLaine, the American film star.

The wedding invitation was on cream-coloured hand-rolled rice paper, littered with gold coats of arms and other insignia. Officially it came from the Maharajah, or King of Sikkim, but I suppose
Denys’ friend from his bachelor days, Her Highness, Princess Pema Yapshi-Pheunkhang, the daughter of the King who had stayed with us the previous year, was really behind it. She was known as
Cocoola and was married to a Tibetan whose family was descended from a Dalai Lama. The bridegroom was her brother, His Highness Gyalsay Palden Thondup Namgyal — Thondup to his friends. He was
marrying as his second wife a twenty-two-year-old American socialite called Hope Cooke. His first wife had been a Tibetan, who had produced two sons and then died giving birth to a daughter. The
two boys, who were educated in England, had become our wards back in England.

But back to that wedding invitation. We had never met Cocoola’s brother and common sense told us that to travel 5,000 expensive miles to attend the marriage of a total stranger was idiocy.
But would we ever again get the opportunity to experience a Buddhist royal wedding ceremony in the heart of the Himalayas? Would it not be almost criminal to turn it down? So against our better
judgement we accepted and mid-April found us flying to India. Denys had the foresight to get a doctor’s chit identifying him as an alcoholic, so that in ‘dry’ Bombay we might be
able to buy some booze. We had stopovers in Calcutta, Delhi and Agra and were lucky enough to see the Taj Mahal, the world’s greatest monument to love, by full moonlight. The white marble
mausoleum, built by the Emperor Shah Jehan to contain the tomb of his favourite wife, seemed to float in the silver light and it was a thousand times more beautiful than I had ever dreamt.