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letter had arrived Billy packed his little bag – he had one set of spare clothes, some stamps and pen and paper with which to write home – and caught the train back to London to start his new life.
    I had been so enthusiastic about joining the staff that I think it was probably a foregone conclusion that I would get the job. I mean, I wasn’t exactly bad looking and I think they had a sixth sense about when a person would fit in well. At the time, I thought I was in heaven and was terrified they might still turn me down. Looking back of course I realised I had got it all out of proportion. I mean, I was only hoping to get the most menial job – I’d have taken anything they’d offered and for those lowly jobs of course the household itself couldn’t afford to be too choosy.
    Always devoted to his mother, he promised to write and return home when he got the chance, but typically he didn’t say goodbye to any of the boys he had known either at school or in the neighbouring houses. Billy’s focus had always been elsewhere and the truth is that he had no particularly close friends among the other Coundon boys. His growing awareness of his homosexuality – still then illegal – no doubt intensified his natural instinct to reticence and secrecy, an instinct that years of royal service would only intensify.
    Billy wrote home soon after arriving at the palace to say that he had his own little room and had just had tea which consistedof ‘eggs and chips followed by jelly’. He loved his family but there was no note of missing them at all in this or in subsequent letters. So far as Billy was concerned, he had finally arrived where he was always destined to be.

Chapter Five
Below stairs
    D OMESTIC STAFF WERE difficult to find after the end of the Second World War, even, occasionally, for the royals. The war had given the working classes broader horizons and the ‘shame and tyranny of the maid’s cap’, as it was known, made many girls and boys seek better-paid and less humiliating factory work. But, despite this, the number of domestic staff employed by the royals in the late 1940s was far higher than in more recent times,when public scrutiny and questions about taxpayer value made one or two members of the royal family wary of seeming to enjoy the attentions of an almost medieval retinue of staff. As we have seen, there were exceptions to this; most notably the Queen Mother.
    Like the upper and middle classes, the royals tried in principle to make do with fewer servants as the 1940s and 1950s wore on. People who had grown up without the faintest notion of how to make a cup of tea or boil an egg, who had had everything done for them, found they could no longer afford the teams of servants they had once taken for granted unless they were prepared to pay the sort of wages offered elsewhere. Those they had relied upon for so long were gradually drifting away and those who remained in service had to be treated with far more respect than had previously been the case.
    It was almost as if there had been a subtle power shift. Elderly aristocratic women were terrified the cook would leave because they knew it would be difficult if not impossible to find a replacement. In the past, the cook would not have been able to leave for alternative employment because there was none. But times had changed and well-paid factory and office jobs were always beckoning. The days when servants had no alternative were over.
    But if servants’ conditions generally were improving around the time Billy started work, there was still a sense in which changes in royal service always came later than elsewhere.
    For junior members of staff – hall boys, junior footmen and kitchen maids – royal palaces were divided strictly. Generally speaking, they were told never to leave their immediate areas of work. It was forbidden for any servant to use the main staircasein the house unless they were given special permission and, above all, no servant was