Night of Triumph
Authors: Peter Bradshaw
First published in 2013 by
Duckworth Overlook
90-93 Cowcross Street, London EC1M 6BF
Tel: 020 7490 7300
Fax: 020 7490 0080
© 2013 by Peter Bradshaw
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
The right of Peter Bradshaw to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBNs
Hardback: 9780715645017
Mobipocket: 9780715645642
ePub: 9780715645659
Library PDF: 9780715645666
For Dominic
‘Should we do anything? Should we do everything?’
Red Cross nurse in Portsmouth, upon hearing the news of VE Day
One
It was not the King’s custom to listen to wireless broadcasts in the presence of his family, but on Tuesday May 8th 1945, at 3pm, he was to be found doing so in a State
Room in Buckingham Palace, along with Her Majesty The Queen, Her Majesty Queen Mary, the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, and his Private Secretary Tommy Lascelles, who stood throughout, having
personally brought in the radio and adjusted it. The speaker was the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill:
Our gratitude to all our splendid Allies goes forth from all our hearts in this island and throughout the British Empire. We may allow ourselves a brief period of
rejoicing, but let us not forget for a moment the toils and efforts that lie ahead. Japan, with all her treachery and greed, remains unsubdued. The injustice she has inflicted upon Great
Britain and the United States, and other countries, and her detestable cruelties call for justice and retribution. We must now devote all our strength and resources to the completion of our
task both at home and abroad. Advance, Britannia! Long live the cause of freedom! God Save The King!
The Prime Minister was succeeded here by a Home Service announcer, and at a nod from the King, Lascelles stepped forward and turned off the set. There was silence. The
Princesses were clear-eyed, waiting for their father to speak: only Margaret’s girlish, inattentive swinging of a foot signalled anything other than a solemn awareness of the occasion.
Finally, the King grunted amiably and said to his wife:
‘Spoke well, eh?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘Cadences. Such cadences. Forms of speech. Never heard anything like it before him.’
‘Oh you have. His style is taken from Lloyd George.’
‘Is it?’
‘Bertie, don’t be an ass, of course it is.’
Ping!
The weather was seasonable, and yet what Queen Mary felt in her hands and fingertips to be a coldness in the air caused one of her rings to slide off and hit the floor, before rolling away who
knows where. On a less glorious day, she might have thought it ominous.
‘Oh, oh dear,’ Mary said in vexation. Lascelles stepped forward, but hesitantly, unsure if his help would be impertinent, conscious of a potentially catastrophic lowering of dignity
on both his part and the Sovereign’s, should she, through an awful sense of politeness, actually feel constrained to forestall him by going down on her hands and knees herself.
Both Princesses jumped up, grateful for something to do; they were soon scurrying about the floor as their parents talked calmly of the continuing war in Japan, and the coming years of peace.
Margaret scampered along, in a showy way, as if childishly chasing a small kitten that she did not really want to catch. Often she would stand up, her fists on her hips, with a theatrical frown of
concentration and annoyance. Mary herself had resumed her seat, apparently content that the girls would find her ring. A footman had been inaudibly called by the Queen, but at a gesture of
dismissal from Mary, had vanished again.
Elizabeth looked for the ring in a far more methodical way, trying to judge the angle of departure from her grandmother’s hand, lightly raking the floor with her fingers, remaining at
ground level, looking along the carpet like a golfer judging the angle of a crucial putt. Where was it? The childish hide-and-seek impulse had come to her easily enough, heaven knows, and yet now
she felt it burdensome. Something about being in the family – what her father had soppily called ‘we four’ – always caused her to revert to childhood, although she was fully
nineteen years old, and as much of a grownup as any. Quite alone in this group, Elizabeth was in uniform: she was in the Auxiliary Territorial Services, the ATS. She wore the khaki belted tunic and
skirt, khaki stockings and the cumbersome flat brown shoes. Not entirely unflattering to her figure, as she had had her dressmaker take in the tunic so that it was more waisted. In fact, Elizabeth
privately believed that her uniform made her look more curvaceous than any of her civilian clothes, and this was an important part of the pride she took in it, though she would naturally never
dream of admitting this to a living soul.
Yet Elizabeth glimpsed her profile at the bottom of a long mirror, and now feared that she looked merely a little girl playing some sort of dressing-up game. She was nineteen!
‘Ha! Very good!’
The last speaker was Mary, because Margaret had now more or less forgotten about her ring, and was doing an impression of Charlie Chaplin’s splay-footed waddle, having borrowed her
grandmother’s furled umbrella as a cane.
‘Awfully good!’
Now her parents had noticed, and both applauded. Was Elizabeth expected to applaud too? If she continued to look for the ring and failed to clap, would she be told off for being grumpy and a bad
sport?
Wait.
There
it was! Elizabeth could see it at the point of Margaret’s Chaplin-cane, the umbrella, as if speared to the floor. Margaret had placed the point of the umbrella directly
into it. She darted over and grasped the shaft of the umbrella and tried to pull it off. Margaret looked down, glanced at Elizabeth’s annoyed face, knelt, flicked the ring into her left palm
with one adroit movement and stood up.
‘Grannie! I’ve found it!’
‘Oh
well
done, Margo!’
‘Jolly well done, Margaret Rose!’
Her parents joined in the exclamations, and her pretty face was showered with kisses. Elizabeth could tell, instantly, that her father loudly exaggerated his compliments to Margaret through
irritation at Elizabeth’s failure to congratulate her sister on finding the ring. Too big for her boots, was it? Lascelles, into whose ear a footman had just whispered, trundled the radio on
castors over to him, and then stepped over to murmur something to Their Majesties. It was while they were all distracted that Elizabeth reached across and with the thumbnail and fingernail, both
filed to an asymmetric point, nipped the loose, puckered flesh behind Margaret’s right elbow. She did not draw blood, but pressed hard enough to make two red lines, like a tiny number eleven,
visible on the flesh.
‘Ow,’ yelped Margaret, and at the same moment Elizabeth snapped ‘Ow’ herself, woundedly holding her own wrist, as the King and Queen sharply glanced in their direction.
This was a piece of strategic cunning Elizabeth had developed in the nursery, in order to obscure the question of guilt, and to overwhelm the grownups with a weary reluctance to sort out who had
started what.
‘Come now, girls,’ said the King, and allowed his sad, undeceived glance to rest on Elizabeth. To behave like babies, at their age. On this day, of all days. His eldest daughter was
ashamed of herself, but vexed as well. When would they believe that she was a grownup? She had had military training. She had done her bit. And, though she hardly dared even to think about it, she
would soon be engaged to be married.
No one dared think about it. A great number of influential people in Parliament and the Empire did not even know about it. Elizabeth’s romance with Philip had been something which had
first bemused her father, then worried him. He considered that an affair of the heart with a man she had first met when she was just thirteen years old signalled her naivety and vulnerability.
Perhaps this romance, like so many of his subjects’, had been dangerously accelerated by the war, and there had moreover been the unspoken possibility that Philip would be killed in action.
But now the war was over; Philip had survived, and thinking about Elizabeth’s marriage was something else that could no longer be put off.
The two girls lowered their eyes and dropped a tiny, propitiatory curtsey.
‘Sorry, papa.’
Philip was still at sea in his ship, the
Renown
; Elizabeth had received another letter from him just that morning, full of baffling and yet inordinately sweet enthusiasm about the men and
the ship, and what he imagined his future naval career to be. Philip would with great simplicity and directness use the words ‘we’ and ‘us’ in relation to all this.
Elizabeth knew that she should feel her heart swell with joy.
And yet it did not.
She had actually quarrelled with Philip at their last meeting, and it was the thought of this that caused Elizabeth’s tummy to contract with anxiety.
They had been at her cousin Marina’s house, walking in the garden. Marina and the staff delicately withdrew to allow them some privacy. They were, of course, intensely, secretly excited.
Could this be the conversation which would include a certain question?
Philip instinctively walked on ahead into the grounds. Elizabeth, just as instinctively, walked a pace or two behind. It was just the same when she went for walks with her father at Sandringham.
She would allow him to forge ahead, to breathe, to think. Then she would find some pretext to catch up, to show him something she had found, to begin a conversation.
That day Elizabeth had not been able to think of anything, and just scampered up and tried to hold his hand. Philip allowed this easily enough, but did not interlace his fingers with hers.
They had walked on, to within sight of the old tennis court, with its sagging net and hulking roller.
‘I say,’ said Philip, ‘shall we have a tennis court when we are married?’
Elizabeth’s heart turned over, both with delight at the suggestion, and disappointment that Philip had still not actually proposed.
‘Well, I don’t know,’ said Elizabeth, ‘
do
you want to get married?’
Instead of playfully shaming him into going down on one knee, as she had hoped that it might, the question appeared only to irritate Philip.
‘Well of course I do!’ he said sharply. ‘Don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ said Elizabeth plaintively. ‘But you might ask a chap properly.’
Philip stopped, lightly took both her hands in his, and even cleared his throat.
‘Lilibet,’ he said, ‘marry me.’
Not quite the question she had been hoping for, more a command from the bridge, but it would do. Without waiting for a reply, however, Philip raised a finger to forestall any other remark. For a
moment, Elizabeth listened in the utter quiet.
‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Do you hear that?’
‘What?’ asked Elizabeth, baffled.
‘That. Do you hear that?’
Again, Elizabeth listened in the complete silence.
‘It’s a nightingale, isn’t it? Or is it a lark?’
‘Philip, what on earth are you talking about?’
‘Well, I like that!’ Philip suddenly exploded. ‘Just when I’m being romantic, you ... you can’t even hear.’ Philip pressed his lips together, and his great
handsome head jerked across to the right, looking dismissively away, presenting her with his profile. Then he stormed back to the house.