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honour’ and became the most successful Queen Consort in the history of the British monarchy.
    Many years later, when the Windsors’ house in Paris was restored after the death of the Duchess, a collection of Christmas cards from Queen Elizabeth was discovered, each of them inscribed
affectionately, giving the lie to the popular view that my aunt bore a deep rooted grudge towards the Duke and Duchess for precipitating her husband into sovereignty, and therefore because of the
stresses and strains involved, particularly during the war, prematurely ending his life. Strangely these cards and other correspondence were found in the Duke’s bath. Apparently, American
style, he always used the shower. Tellingly the only card which retained its envelope was from a rather second rank royal who shall be nameless. It was addressed to ‘Their Royal Highnesses,
the Duke and Duchess of Windsor’. The Duchess, of course, was never granted royal status and was buried at Windsor in a coffin with a brass plate inscribed ‘Wallis, Duchess of
Windsor’.

    Guests at Carberry. The King and Queen and Princess Margaret watch participants in the game ‘Are you there Moriarty?’. My mother stands next to her sister,
Queen Elizabeth, and in the background can be glimpsed the royal nanny, Clara Knight, known as Allah
    My parents would rent a house in London for the summer season when my two sisters would do the debutante rounds of balls and parties. This was known as ‘coming out’, which
    doesn’t mean what it does today, but being presented to the King and Queen at Court, wearing white dresses with trains, long white gloves and three ostrich feathers on top of the head.
    Crowds used to gather in the Mall to watch the cars containing the debutantes queuing to drop them off at Buckingham Palace. The presentation involved having your name announced by the Lord
    Chamberlain and then curtseying in turn to the King and Queen. The names of those participating in this ritual were then entered in an official register and they were then deemed to have a
    passport to so-called high society. The Queen finally brought the curtain down on it all in 1958, the demand for entrée having become unmanageable. As Princess Margaret was said to have
    remarked: ‘We had to end it. Every tart in London was getting in.’ Quite! By the time I was eligible when I was eighteen in 1943, the presentations were in abeyance, for which I was
    very grateful. It took a world war to save me from such an embarrassing rite of passage, although it was never regarded as such, only as a regular hurdle in the course of growing up.
    My memories of Queen Elizabeth started when I was about five with my annual visits to Birkhall, on the Balmoral estate. The house dates from the eighteenth century, and since 1930 it had been
lent by King George V to the Duke and Duchess of York to use when the Royal Family migrated to Scotland for their summer and early autumn holiday. When I was very young I told the King and Queen
that if I ever married I would love to spend my honeymoon there and when I did get married, to Denys Rhodes, a cousin of Patrick Plunket, in 1950, they angelically remembered and let us have the
house for two weeks, generously installing a cook as well. Three years earlier Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip spent part of their honeymoon there too. My cousin wrote to me from Birkhall, two
weeks after her marriage describing its beauty under the December snows, the peace and quiet and how the local people left them undisturbed. ‘Scots are nice that way,’ she said. There
were shooting outings, but the stalkers who, because of the eccentricity of their attire resembled a very mixed rag bag, rather took the Princess aback. ‘We were,’ she said,
‘confronted with the most scurvy-looking lot of ruffians that I have ever seen!’ Thereafter, having found her army boots and leather jerkin, ‘I looked more in keeping with
everyone else.’ She added: ‘I