Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret. Craig Brown

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ Clynes boarded the train to Scotland in good time, arriving at Cortachy Castle, where they would be staying, promptly on the morning of 5 August. A special telephone wire had been installed from Glamis to Cortachy, with a dispatch rider at hand in case the wire broke down.

      The two men were to have a long wait. Clynes, quiet and retiring, occupied his time with long walks, sometimes in the company of his hostess, Lady Airlie. Boyd, on the other hand, was more worked-up; he preferred to stay indoors, fearful lest he miss the vital phone call. Nor did he rule out the possibility of an accident, or some sort of muddle-up, or even sabotage. Had he spent too long out East? ‘I could not help feeling that his long residence in China was inclining him to view the situation in too oriental a light,’ Lady Airlie recalled in her memoirs.

      On the 11th, the three of them – the home secretary, the countess, the civil servant – were on red alert, sitting up all night, ‘sustained by frequent cups of coffee’, but it was a false alarm. On the 14th, Boyd lost his temper when Clynes said he was thinking of going sightseeing with Lady Airlie; on the morning of the 21st, ‘wild-eyed and haggard after sitting up all night’, Boyd telephoned Glamis for any news, and was told there was none. Unable to contain his nerves, he stomped out into the garden and started kicking stones.

      That same evening, just as they were dressing for dinner, the call from Glamis at last came through. Boyd, wearing only a blue kimono, a souvenir from his China days, was caught on the hop. ‘What? In an hour? We must start at once!’ With that, he leapt into his suit and rushed downstairs, where he found Clynes already waiting in his coat and Homburg. ‘Just look at that, Boyd!’ said Clynes, pointing to the sunset. ‘In such a night stood Dido …’ But Boyd was in no mood for an impromptu Shakespeare recital, and pushed Clynes headlong into the waiting car.

      They arrived at Glamis with barely half an hour to spare. At 9.22 p.m., attended by her three doctors, the Duchess gave birth to a baby girl. Once the baby had been weighed (6lbs 3oz), the home secretary was ushered into the bedroom to bear witness. ‘I found crowded round the baby’s cot the Duke of York, Lord and Lady Strathmore and Lady Rose Leveson-Gower, the Duchess’s sister. They at once made way for me, and I went to the cot and peeping in saw a fine chubby-faced little girl lying wide awake.’

      The news that the King had another grandchild – his fourth – was greeted with forty-one-gun salutes from the Royal Horse Artillery in both Hyde Park and the Tower of London, together with the ringing of the bells of St Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster Abbey. The following evening, 4,000 people gathered in the Glamis village square and followed the Glamis Pipe Band up Hunter’s Hill as it played boisterous renditions of ‘The Duke of York’s Welcome’, ‘Highland Laddie’ and ‘The Earl of Strathmore’s Welcome’. With everyone gathered at the summit, two young villagers lit a six-hundred-foot-high brushwood beacon. Within minutes, its flames could be seen from miles around.

       9

      Princess Margaret was born in 1930, the same year as air hostess and newscaster entered the language, and died in 2002, when googling, selfie, blogger and weapons of mass destruction first appeared.

      Is it just me, or do a remarkably high proportion of the words that share her birthday also reflect something of her character? Blasé first made the Channel crossing in 1930, subtly altering its meaning on the way: in its home country of France, it meant ‘sated by enjoyment’, while here in Britain it meant something closer to ‘bored or unimpressed through over-familiarity’. Also from France, or eighteenth-century France, came negligée, with that extra ‘e’ to show that it now meant a lacy, sexy dressing gown rather than an informal gown worn by men and women alike.

      Inventions that first came on the market in 1930, thus introducing new words to the language, included bulldozer, electric blanket and jingle, all of which have a faint echo of Margaret about them. The Gibson – a martini-like cocktail consisting of gin and vermouth with a cocktail onion – was introduced to fashionable society. In All About Eve (1950), Bette Davis serves her guests Gibsons, saying, ‘Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.’

      Then again, learner-driver, washing-up machine and snack bar also came into being in 1930, yet it’s hard to relate any of them to Princess Margaret, who never learned to drive, nor to operate a washing-up machine. And, as far as I know, she never entered a snack bar.

      Also making their first entries that year were to bale out, meaning to make an emergency parachute jump, to feel up, meaning to grope or fondle, and sick-making, meaning to make one either feel queasy, or vomit, depending on the force of one’s reaction. Each of these three has something Margaret-ish about it, as do crooner and eye shadow and the adjective luxury.

      Two concepts dear to any biographer, but perhaps particularly dear to biographers of Princess Margaret, entered the language in the year of her birth: guesstimate and whodunnit.

      There also came a word that had been around for several centuries, but which, as a direct result of the birth of the little Princess in 1930, was to take on a life of its own.

       Horoscope.

       10

At his office in Fleet Street, John Gordon, the editor of the Sunday Express, was struggling to come up with a fresh angle on the news of another royal birth. Then it came to him: why not ask Cheiro,* the most famous astrologer of the day, to predict what life might have in store for her? Cheiro had, in his time, given personal readings to, among others, Oscar Wilde, General Kitchener, Mark Twain and King Edward VII. The little Princess would surely be a doddle.

      Gordon telephoned Cheiro’s office, only to be informed by his assistant, R.H. Naylor, that the great man was unavailable. Instead, Naylor put himself forward for the task. His article, ‘What the Stars Foretell for the New Princess’, duly appeared the following Sunday.

      Naylor foretold that Princess Margaret Rose would have ‘an eventful life’, a prediction that was possibly on the safe side, since few lives are without any event whatsoever. Moreover, it would be decades before anyone could confidently declare it to have been entirely uneventful, and by that time people’s minds would have been distracted by other, more eventful, things. More particularly, Naylor predicted that ‘events of tremendous importance to the Royal Family and the nation will come about near her seventh year’.

      The article proved a huge success, so much so that Gordon proceeded to commission Naylor to write forecasts for the months ahead. As luck – or chance, or fate – would have it, one of his predictions was that ‘a British aircraft will be in danger between October 8th and 15th’. He was just three days out: on 5 October, on its maiden overseas flight, the passenger airship R101 crashed in Beauvais, France, killing forty-eight of the fifty-four people on board.

      Naylor’s reputation was made. John Gordon now hit on the idea of asking him to write a weekly column making predictions for all Sunday Express readers according to their birthdays. Naylor puzzled for some time over how to incorporate 365 different forecasts into a single column, and eventually devised a more off-the-peg system by dividing the sun’s 360-degree transit into twelve zones, each of them spanning thirty degrees. He then named each of the twelve zones after a different celestial constellation, and offered blocks of predictions for each birth sign. This was how the modern horoscope came into being.

СКАЧАТЬ