The Final Curtsey Read Online Free PDF Page B

the garden or go for a bracing walk. The children of a nearby family who lolled around all day reading magazines and novels were cited as examples of degeneracy. To this day I feel guilty if I
remain inside for any length of time. Good manners were high on the agenda and my brothers were taught to raise their caps to any woman they met, be she Duchess or the under gardener’s wife.
And Carberry, despite its size and the servants, was a touch Spartan. There was no central heating and the water in the bowl on my washstand in my bedroom would sometimes freeze over in the winter.
I never heard my parents swear and I remember my eldest brother being roundly reprimanded for taking the name of his Maker in vain.
    My brothers went away to school. John was sent to a prep school at Broadstairs on the coast of Kent, and tried to run away, boarding a ship as a stowaway. He was luckily caught before he
disappeared over the horizon. He eventually went to Eton and Christ Church, Oxford. Andrew went to Eton too and then New College, Oxford. But school, or in fact any form of serious education, was
never actually suggested for my sisters or me. I had a French governess called Sita Rivoir, who came from an obscure region called the Vallee Vaudoise where her father was a Protestant pastor. She
was very small and deeply religious. I became pretty hot stuff at the Collects and the Epistles and much less hot stuff at arithmetic which Mademoiselle had never managed to master herself. I did
however of course learn French.

    Tug of war. Princess Elizabeth at the front, then Princess Margaret and then me
    Many are the times I had to stretch my lips to say the word ‘belle’ so that it did not sound like ‘bell’. After about eight years dealing with me, poor Mademoiselle
    retired to a nunnery where I once visited her. It is etched in my memory because I was made to wear a veil which, needless to say, slipped off lopsidedly. Also my painted nails seemed
    inappropriate and I spent ages trying to pick the paint off, so that I at least had two white fingernails to hold my knife and fork while we ate and listened to readings from Holy Scripture.
    Princess Elizabeth’s governess was Marion ‘Crawfie’ Crawford, who was introduced to the Duke and Duchess of York by another of my aunts, Lady Rose Leveson Gower. She was very
nice really, but then she wrote that sugary book about the childhood of Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret, which so upset Queen Elizabeth, who could not even begin to contemplate that anyone
should commit such a breach of trust. Looking back over the years it was pretty innocent stuff, but in those days different standards applied. I haven’t read it, and I don’t think I
shall.
    Princess Elizabeth and I were really the last generation of girls from families like ours who didn’t go to school. I thought school would be ghastly; you’d have to play hockey. I
didn’t want to play hockey. I did, however, have dancing lessons and I was at the dancing school in Edinburgh the day the abdication of King Edward VIII was announced. To my eternal shame I hopped around the room chanting: ‘My uncle
Bertie is going to be King.’ Very soon afterwards ‘Uncle Bertie’ became ‘Sir’. Princess Elizabeth became Heiress Presumptive, the ‘Presumptive’ inserted
just in case she later had a brother. I believed she hoped she might have one and be let off the hook, but deep down she knew that wasn’t very likely. She accepted that she would be Queen one
day, but thought it was a long way off. Sadly it came to her much sooner than she expected.
    Much has been written and said about the so-called bad blood between Queen Elizabeth and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, but not once in all the years I was with my aunt — not once
— did I ever hear her say anything remotely unpleasant about them. Becoming Queen was not what she wanted, or expected, but when it happened she accepted it, calling it ‘this
intolerable