The Autobiography of The Queen Read Online Free

changing gear. But there had been hitches on previous royal tours and recalcitrant or dangerous drivers had been weeded out and replaced with an equerry – sometimes even the Duke himself. There was nothing to worry about – this, the Queen reminded herself, was an adage of the late Queen Mother and had proved on every occasion to be right, since even wartime visits to bomb sites had produced, with the help of a dry martini, a supremely unworried expression on the face of the King’s consort.
    â€˜Number Five, Bananaquit Drive,’ the Queen instructed the man who was to ferry her to a new life amongst her erstwhile (but surely still grateful) subjects. Independence had been granted in 1979. There must be many who wished they were still under the protection of their Queen.
    The driver glanced over his shoulder at his elderly female fare with some surprise. His card said Alvyne Smith. It dangled along with a plastic Christmas tree above the steering wheel, so the Queen for a moment wished that Brno had come up with a more inventive surname for a departing monarch than the ubiquitous Smith.
    â€˜Où ça?’ bellowed Alvyne as a jumbo shrieked overhead, the very plane, as the Queen saw, which had brought her here a couple of hours before. Apang (the Queen had never felt homesick, even on trips to safaris, African kingdoms, Australian garden parties and the rest, so she was at first, as with the open hostility of the Bostocks, able only to envisage indigestion as the enemy within) brought her sharply to the side window of the van: one always rid oneself of these tiresome complaints by concentrating on one’s subjects. Who she would meet – and vitally, indeed more frequently now the globe had shrunk over the years to accommodate the royal tours and their inevitable repetition – the names and details of those she had met on earlier occasions were provided by a lady-in-waiting on a printed sheet. It would be bad form to ask of a person whether they had come far to meet their reigning sovereign if they’d given the answer before. Of course, people moved house all the time these days, so that particular ploy was fairly foolproof, but the occasion when Lady Emily had been down with flu and the startled pensioner had had to remind the Queen that she and her family had famously come over from Ireland just before the last walkabout and Her Majesty must surely remember this, had made the Queen wary. And today, of course, there was no lady-in-waiting, and there never would be again.
    The delay in the emergence of the Head of the British Nation on to the tarmac outside Hewanorra Airport had been due to a combination of circumstances, most of these in one way or another connected to the Queen.
    First, there had been the oddity of the US hundred-dollar notes distributed by an old lady to some of the roughest-looking porters, men from Vieux Fort with a history of crime – and the equally astonishing fact that not one of these men appeared prepared to accept the bounty so generously offered. Pouncing on the neat, lavender-tweed-suited figure as she emerged from Customs (where she had been arrested for failing to fill in a form: this was eventually supplied by a customs broker who wrote down the name and address of a Mrs Gloria Smith, Joli Estate) a gaggle of porters had demanded of the Queen that she indicate her luggage so they could wheel it out into the arrival bay and call her a cab.
    But the Queen, who had now taught herself to ask the cost of things, demanded to know how much this service would be – and it was this which caused an uproar, as different currencies such as EC (Caribbean dollars) and even sterling and francs (Martinique, only twenty miles across the sea, was regularly visited by those who could afford the trip) were shouted out in the baggage hall. The Queen, flustered by the chaos caused by her simple question, had pulled her travel folder from the white handbag; and seeing