Read Online The Final Curtsey by Margaret Rhodes - Free Book Online Page B

climbing in and out of windows and
generally causing mayhem. I remember watching Sir Samuel Hoare, the Lord Privy Seal, being made to run like the devil and becoming very hot, bothered and confused. I try and imagine a similar
holder of high office doing the same nowadays, and I can’t. But Queen Elizabeth was very persuasive.
    The membership of the first Balmoral house party for the beginning of the grouse shooting was always the same and included Lord and Lady Eldon and Lord and Lady Salisbury. Lord Salisbury —
‘Bobbety’ to the Royal Family — was a great statesman, but was fortunate, or unfortunate, depending on your point of view, in having his birthday in the middle week of August. At
dinner he would be crowned with staghorn moss and rhymes would be declaimed. Queen Elizabeth was always a leading player in this rather pagan ceremony. During the last stages of dinner we would
belt out the latest hit songs. When she was older, Princess Margaret, who had a satirical wit, would create topical new lyrics for these top of the pops performances. She missed her vocation; she
should have been in cabaret.
    Often there were four and sometimes six pipers in attendance, circling the table at the end of dinner before heading off down the passage with the pipes dying gently away. The pipers were two
gamekeepers, a gardener, a pony man and a gate keeper, kilted and plaided in the grey and red Balmoral tartan. One piper was well known to imbibe generously before playing and the unsteady pattern
of his march, let alone his piping, caused a lot of secret amusement. Before dinner one jolly evening, Magdalen Eldon, a well-known practical joker, did some art work on the white marble statue of
Queen Victoria’s beloved Prince Albert, which stood in the corridor outside the drawing room. She applied lipstick, rouge and mascara and the Prince Consort looked awful. The King was clearly
not too distressed by this, although Victoria, had she known would have been furious. It took many hours of hard work to erase the damage, but Albert once scrubbed down resumed his former air of
inscrutable benevolence. These dinners were, however, not without their formality. When the Queen rose to lead the ladies out, they in turn stopped at the door and made a low curtsey to the King,
which he acknowledged with a bow to each one. That doesn’t happen now, of course, as it is the Queen herself who leads the ladies out.
    At Balmoral the male members of the Royal Family wear the grey and red Balmoral tartan, designed by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in the 1850s. It was here that I learned my first lesson in
the male anatomy. My mentor was the King’s younger brother, the Duke of Gloucester, who unfortunately never quite mastered the correct technique of adjusting the kilt when seated.
    Years and years later, at the annual Ghillies Ball at Balmoral, the Resident Factor, who is responsible for the management of the Balmoral estate, kilted of course, was sitting out one of the
reels on a leather-covered banquette. It was perhaps a little over-warm and when the Queen approached, he had to struggle to rise — slowly and with obvious difficulty. His bare bottom had
stuck to the leather and there was an unexpressed ‘ouch’. He told me afterwards: ‘I only hope that Her Majesty thought the tears in my eyes were due to the emotion I felt at being
addressed by her.’

 
    CHAPTER FOUR
Secret Army
    I tiptoed into the world of work with a difference when I finished my shorthand and typing course. I wanted to ‘do my bit’, as the saying then went and join the
Women’s Royal Naval Service, the WRNS, but for a now forgotten reason I found myself in MI6 as a small cog in the shadowy world of espionage. It was all dreadfully hush-hush, and for an
impressionable eighteen-year-old tremendously mysterious. I reported each day with some trepidation to an office disguised as ‘Passport Control’ near St James’s Park underground
station.