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King and Queen in 1937. My cousins had specially designed dresses, robes and coronets. Princess Margaret was a couple of months short
    of eight, but I was not invited as I was thought to be too young. Everybody else seemed to be going, shaking the mothballs from their robes and ermine — probably rabbit in some cases
    — including my mother and father as a peer and peeress and also my brothers and sisters.
    I was particularly put out because a girl I knew of my own age, who had a tiny drop of Royal blood, was attending in a lovely long dress. However on the morning of the great day I was taken to
Buckingham Palace, kitted out in my best pink coat with a velvet collar, where I had breakfast with my cousins and was then taken along the corridor to see the King and Queen in their finery. The
King was wearing a white shirt, breeches and stockings and a crimson satin coat and the Queen a wonderful be-sequined long dress. Then a Page came in and said it was time for the Princesses to go
down to the Grand Entrance where their carriage was waiting. My only other memory of the coronation was looking out of a window of the palace and watching the procession of the Indian maharajahs
and princes, their tunics, coats and turbans encrusted with diamonds worth a king’s ransom. They looked wonderfully grand and romantic. Even the horses pulling their carriages were clad in
the most gorgeous tack and over seventy years on the memory of that fantastic procession remains vivid.
    The 1937 coronation was the last enactment of British style pomp and circumstance before Europe was plunged into war. Princess Elizabeth recorded her day in a lined exercise book, neatly tied
round with a piece of pink ribbon and with a touching dedication inscribed in red crayon on the cover. It read: ‘The Coronation, 12th May 1937, to Mummy and Papa, in memory of their
coronation, from Lilibet by Herself. An Account of the Coronation.’ It is preserved in the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle and its ingenuous freshness has lost nothing by the passing of the
years, setting the scene in my view more effectively than the prose of official historians. I got a small mention on the last page.
    I did make it to the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, sixteen years later, as one of the privileged 8,000 that had been invited to the Abbey. We all received a list of do’s and
don’ts from the Earl Marshal, the Duke of Norfolk, the choreographer of the occasion, including notes of what we should wear. I was pregnant with my second daughter, Victoria, but contrived
to match up by wearing my wedding dress cunningly let out around the waist. My husband Denys of course came too in the full dress uniform of the Rifle Brigade. Throughout the ceremony we sat on
stools stamped with the royal cypher, and were allowed to take them away as souvenirs. One is now, a touch lèse majesté, in the loo and the other in my bedroom. We had to get
there hours before the action started and were rigidly enclosed. At the time I wondered about the predicament of the more elderly peers and peeresses when nature beset them.
    In 1938 and 1939, despite the sabre-rattling coming from Berlin, my routine continued. In the last August of peace I was dispatched to Birkhall as usual to keep Princess Elizabeth and Princess
Margaret company. The King and Queen must have been desperately worried, but they never imparted the deepening sense of crisis to us. I didn’t know it, but on 22 August Europe shuddered at
the announcement of the Soviet-German non-aggression pact and then groaned in anguished apprehension for few doubted that this could but betoken war. The King and Queen at once returned to
London.
    The tide of war seemed inexorable and at dawn on 1 September, the Wehrmacht crossed the Polish frontier. The timing of the ultimatum sent to the German Chancellor, demanding he withdraw his
troops or accept a declaration of war by Britain and France, had passed and so we were at war from