Elizabeth the Queen Read Online Free Page B

Gloucestershire—she was already captivated by breeding and racing.
    During girlhood visits with her father to his stables at Hampton Court and Sandringham, she took in the rudiments of a breeding operation, and she began to master the genealogical permutations of temperament and physical conformation vital to producing successful horses. She saw the formidable stallions as well as mares and their foals, and she watched young horses training on the Wiltshire “gallops,” great swaths of springy turf on the crests of rolling hills that mimic the straightaways and curves of a racetrack. She came to know the grooms and stable boys, the trainers and jockeys—an unaffected community that views life differently because of the primacy of their animals. As she told artist Frolic Weymouth years later, “horses are the greatest levelers in the world.”
    She also had a natural rapport with dogs. In 1933 her father became fascinated with Welsh corgis—a breed with pointed snout, outsize ears, and stumpy legs—and gave her Dookie, the first in a long line of corgis that became her trademark. She has had as many as a dozen at a time, and they often precede her like a “moving carpet,” as Diana, Princess of Wales, put it. The dogs served as icebreakers, although they could sometimes intimidate guests or employees with their snappish personalities. “They’re heelers,” Elizabeth II once explained. “They’re cattle dogs so they bite,” adding with a sly smile, “They chase people.”
    Even before the family moved to Buckingham Palace in 1937 when Lilibet’s father took the throne, making friends was complicated for the young princess. When she became heiress presumptive, the little girls who visited had to curtsy and call her “Ma’am.” “It was a very inhibiting experience,” recalled Lady Elizabeth Cavendish, who was invited to play and take tea at Buckingham Palace. During one visit by the royal family to the 12th Earl and Countess of Airlie’s Cortachy Castle in Scotland, the Airlies’ son, Jamie Ogilvy, took Princess Elizabeth and tossed her onto a sofa. Moments later, his father came up, punched him in the stomach, and said, “Never do that to royalty.” “The Princess didn’t mind,” recalled Ogilvy, “but that was the structure in which she was brought up.”
    As Crawfie observed, life in the Palace brought down “a glass curtain between you and the outer world.” Buckingham Palace is an overwhelming place, with 775 rooms, more the head office of the monarchy than a home. Lilibet spent many hours gazing out the windows watching the world pass below her, wondering about the lives of the “real people.”
    To expand her horizons beyond the family, and to diminish the sense of isolation, Crawfie organized a troop of Girl Guides (the equivalent of American Girl Scouts) at the Palace. The original group of twenty included relatives such as Patricia Mountbatten, the “quite fierce” (in Lilibet’s view) leader of the Kingfisher patrol to whom the heiress presumptive actually had to defer, and aristocratic friends such as Lady Camilla “Micky” Wallop (daughter of the 9th Earl of Portsmouth), as well as daughters of chauffeurs and other Palace employees.
    Using either a designated room in the Palace or the summerhouse in the forty-acre garden as the headquarters, the girls built campfires, watched birds, and played team games. The future Queen was rough-and-ready. She “was brought up knowing she mustn’t cry in public, which becomes a way of life,” Patricia Mountbatten recalled. “As a child she was told, ‘If you fall down, you don’t make a face.’ ”
    D IGNITARIES WHO VISITED the King and Queen were introduced to the princesses, who were expected to make intelligent conversation with them during dinner. Elizabeth was as interested in people as her mother, but she lacked Queen Elizabeth’s spontaneous enjoyment of others. Queen Elizabeth helped Lilibet overcome her diffidence by