feeling of doom and gloom.” Windsor’s windows were blacked out, the castle was reinforced with barbed wire and protected by batteries of antiaircraft guns, the vast rooms were illuminated by bare low-wattage bulbs, and hot water was so limited that lines were drawn at five inches in all bathtubs—although the family ate well, with supplies of meat and game from various royal estates. The princesses became accustomed to what their mother described as “the whistle & scream of bombs,” yet she fretted that they were “looking different” because “the noise of guns is so heavy” and so much ordnance landed in the vicinity—nearly three hundred high-explosive bombs by the war’s end. “Though they are so good & composed,” she wrote to Queen Mary, “there is always the listening, & occasionally a leap behind the door, and it does become a strain.”
Several times the family escaped for brief holidays at Balmoral, where Queen Elizabeth was delighted to see her daughters revive with “pink cheeks and good appetites” after walks in the crisp air on the heather-covered hills rising above Royal Deeside, the valley along the River Dee that had been the sentimental heart of the family since the time of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. The heiress presumptive’s great-great-grandparents had bought the Balmoral estate in 1852 after falling in love with the Scottish Highlands. “All seemed to breathe freedom and peace,” Victoria wrote in her journal, “and to make one forget the world and its sad turmoils.”
Victoria and Albert tore down the existing residence and built a larger Balmoral castle of gleaming off-white granite that would weather into a gray hue, with a hundred-foot-high tower, turrets and gables, all according to Albert’s own exacting adaptation of the baronial style. They decked out the interior with a riot of different-colored tartan plaid rugs, curtains, carpets, and linoleum, thistle-patterned wallpaper, landscape paintings by Sir Edwin Landseer, and stags’ heads lining the hallways. Large windows captured vistas of lawns, gardens, pine forests, and hills up the valley of the Dee—the outdoor paradise that shaped their family expeditions.
In the four decades since Victoria’s death in 1901, remarkably little had changed at Balmoral, and her descendants felt the magic of the place intensely. It was the sanctuary where the family had spent two months each autumn, a sacrosanct interlude they would resume at war’s end. During their quick wartime Highland respites Lilibet shot her first stag and caught her first salmon—a modest eight pounds. The King, his wife, daughters, and courtiers amused themselves after dinner with games of charades lasting until midnight, highlighted by Tommy Lascelles imitating a St. Bernard so noisily that he lost his voice.
In the early part of the war, the King and Queen kept up their social life with periodic balls at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle. One dance in December 1943 for “young men and maidens” at Windsor lasted until 4 A.M. The King was famous for being “the best waltzer in the world,” and he let loose on the dance floor, even leading a conga line through the glittering state rooms. Later in the war, Elizabeth slipped into London from time to time—for the occasional dinner party, and to attend her first opera,
Crawfie worked to keep the atmosphere light at the castle by organizing games of hide and seek and sardines as well as treasure hunts with the officers, and she set up a Madrigal Society so the girls could sing with guardsmen and boys from Eton. At Christmas the princesses appeared with local schoolchildren in the annual pantomime, a full-scale production staged in the Waterloo Chamber. Elizabeth was called on to sing and tap-dance before audiences of more than five hundred, including townspeople and soldiers. Crawfie remarked on her poise, and her riding instructor, Horace Smith, was struck by her “confidence and vigour,” as well as her droll delivery of comic lines.
Periodically word came that officers she knew had died in battle—including, in 1942, her uncle Prince George, the Duke of Kent, in a plane crash while serving in the Royal Air Force, leaving three children, the youngest only seven weeks old. “What a beastly time it is for people growing up,” Queen Elizabeth wrote to her brother David in 1943. “Lilibet meets young Grenadiers at Windsor and then they get killed, & it is horrid for someone so young.” While later in life friends would remark that the Queen found it nearly impossible to write condolence notes about the deaths of those close to her, during the war she readily would take up her pen to write to an officer’s mother, “and give her a little picture of how much she had appreciated him at Windsor and what they had talked about,” Crawfie recalled.
Antoinette de Bellaigue, Marion Crawford, and Henry Marten continued their instruction during the war years. Marten traveled up the hill to the castle in a dog cart, his Gladstone bag bulging with the princess’s textbooks. Sir Owen Morshead, the royal librarian, augmented the curriculum with regular tours of Windsor’s collections, including artifacts such as the shirt worn by King Charles I when he was beheaded, and the lead shot that killed Lord Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar. (The priceless paintings had been removed from their frames and sent away for safekeeping.) The future Queen would later say that she considered Windsor to be her home because it represented “all the happiest memories of childhood.”
The Girl Guides kept up their activities as well, giving Elizabeth an unexpectedly democratic experience when refugees from London’s bomb-ravaged East End were taken in by families on the Windsor estate and joined the troop. The girls earned their cooking badges, with instruction from a castle housekeeper, by baking cakes and scones (a talent Elizabeth would later display for a U.S. president) and making stew and soup. With their Cockney accents and rough ways, the refugees gave the future Queen no deference, calling her Lilibet, the nickname even daughters of aristocrats were forbidden to use, and compelling her to wash dishes in an oily tub of water and clean up the charred remains of campfires.
The most unusual—and memorable—training received by Elizabeth was a three-week stint she did in 1945 when she was eighteen, at the Mechanical Transport Training Centre run by the Auxiliary Territorial Service. The skills she acquired there figure in a pivotal scene in
Although the scene was invented, her automobile expertise was a genuine source of pride for Elizabeth II. She told Labour politician Barbara Castle more than two decades after the war that her ATS training was the only time she had ever been able to measure herself against her contemporaries. The other eleven young women at the training center were actually several years older, but Second Subaltern Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor wore the same drab uniform and was given the same instruction: learning to drive a three-ton truck in heavy London traffic, changing wheels and spark plugs, understanding the workings of ignition systems, bleeding brakes, and stripping down engines. Her face and hands got grimy from the grease, and she had to salute her senior officers. But the experience gave her confidence and expert driving skills. “I’ve never worked so hard in my life,” she told a friend. “Everything I learnt was brand new to me—all the oddities of the insides of a car.”
With the exception of her first tightly scripted radio broadcast in 1940 to children displaced by the war—a sentimental speech delivered in a little-girl voice after numerous rehearsals to master her breathing and phrasing —Elizabeth carried out few official duties until the last years of the war. In 1944 she traveled to Wales with the King and Queen to visit miners, gave her first public speeches in London at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital for Children and the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, launched her first battleship, and attended her first official dinner at Buckingham Palace in honor of the prime ministers of the British Dominions.
When England celebrated Victory in Europe Day on May 8, 1945, Elizabeth joined her family and Prime Minister Winston Churchill on the balcony at Buckingham Palace to greet the cheering throngs. That night, she and Margaret Rose escaped the confines of the Palace with Crawfie, Toni de Bellaigue, and the King’s equerry as their chaperones. Among the group of sixteen were their cousin Margaret Rhodes and several guards officers, including Henry Porchester, who would become her lifelong friend and closest adviser on horse breeding and racing. Proudly wearing her ATS uniform, the future Queen linked arms with her friends and surged through the crowds, tearing along St. James’s Street, and joyfully dancing the conga, the Lambeth Walk, and the hokey-cokey. When they returned to the Palace railings, the princesses joined the crowds shouting, “We want the King; we want the Queen,” and cheered when their parents appeared on the balcony. Elizabeth and Margaret Rose slipped back into the Palace through a garden gate, and Queen Elizabeth “provided us with sandwiches she made herself,” recalled Toni de Bellaigue.
The following night, the revels continued. “Out in crowd again,” Elizabeth recorded in her diary. “Embankment, Piccadilly, Pall Mall, walked simply miles. Saw parents on balcony at 12:30 am—ate, partied, bed 3am!” “It was a unique burst of personal freedom,” wrote Margaret Rhodes, “a Cinderella moment in reverse, in which they could pretend that they were ordinary and unknown.”
Three months later, the group ventured out again to mark the victory over Japan. Once more they “walked
