‘I guess that’s where she went,’ Joan said, having made sure it was at the top of the basket containing the Queen’s private correspondence.
‘Nursing,’ the Queen observed. ‘Good.’
She was feeling nervous, because in forty-eight hours she would be addressing millions across the nation and the Commonwealth, live on television, and she knew she had to connect with them. She would welcome them into her home, the first time they would see her there, and talk about being frightened – of the future, of technology, of rapid change – and about the deeply held values that got her through. She hoped Daphne was right about it, but regardless of what Daphne thought, it was what the Queen wanted to say.
She had had moments of feeling enormously frightened this year, but she had worked through them and done the right thing, or at least, she hoped she had. Promising a life of public service made everything straightforward in the end: you knew what you were supposed to do. Nursing, in that context, sounded like an excellent choice for Lucie Seymour.
‘I have something for you,’ the Queen said to Joan. She opened her desk drawer and took out a narrow, wrapped box.
‘Shall I open it now?’ Joan asked.
‘Why not save it until you’re at home with your father?’
Joan travelled to Cambridge by train that evening, and unwrapped the box on Christmas morning, in her father’s rooms at St Anselm’s. It was a blue cardboard affair, bearing the name of one of the royal jewellers. Inside, was a smaller box made of silver and blue enamel, with the royal cipher engraved below the clasp.
‘That’s very nice,’ Vincent McGraw said approvingly. ‘What’s it for?’
Joan smiled at her father. ‘I think it’s for keeping secrets.’
‘No doubt. I mean, what are you actually going to keep in it?’
Joan thought about it. Hector Ross had given her a single string of iridescent, perfectly matched, absolutely illicit pearls before she left for Sandringham. ‘You need these,’ he’d explained briskly, sweeping her hair aside to attach them around her neck. ‘Office uniform.’ She was wearing them now.
‘More secrets,’ she said.
Afternotes
Sharp-eyed readers may recognise number 22, the Arts and Crafts house in Cresswell Place where the dubious academics stayed, as the mews house of Agatha Christie. She was one of the first people to do up a traditional servants’ house in the 1920s and set her short story ‘Murder in the Mews’ there. With admirable generosity, she lent the place to a couple of friends, who ended up introducing her to her future husband, Max Mallowan. Sometimes good deeds do go unpunished. The other houses are invented.
Duke Ellington actually met the Queen at a white-tie event at the Leeds Music Festival in 1958, so I have borrowed their exchange for a private event a year earlier. This is what he said about meeting the royal couple:
‘You are astonished by the applause and then struck speechless by the grace of the beautiful Queen . . . HM’s general tone reflects the contentment of a normally happy married life, in contradiction of all the rumours and accounts of monarchs, which restores your faith in people as people. A handsome couple with careers. Two young people trying to get along.’
He did indeed write a suite for her after that meeting, and had a single copy produced to give her as a personal gift. The Queen’s Suite, now recognised as among his most beautiful compositions, remained hidden from the public until after Ellington’s death in 1974. I listened to the centrepiece of the suite, a song without words called ‘The Single Petal of A Rose’, many times while I wrote this book. The Queen remained a fan of Ellington’s music all her life.
Daphne du Maurier really was married to General Boy Browning, who had also been Princess Elizabeth’s head of household and then worked for Prince Philip. As a couple, they went to Balmoral, which Daphne hated because of the stuffiness of court life. But not, as far as I know, in 1957. However, she was asked to work on the Christmas message that year, which is how I got to find out about this – to me – extraordinary association with the Queen. And yes, Prince Philip was a fan, with a love of sailing in common (though not, I imagine, her novels). He was rumoured to have asked her advice before he married. I like to think the author of Frenchman’s Creek would not have advised in favour unless she thought he was deeply in love.
Billy Hill was unimpressed about having his phone tapped by the police. He retired to Spain, but bought a nightclub in Tangier in the late 1950s, which his partner, Gypsy, ran for many years. I wonder where he got the idea from . . . His place in the London underworld was taken by his protégés, the Krays.
My story contains echoes of scandals that would eventually happen in the 1960s – the Profumo affair, featuring the swimming pool at Cliveden; the Third, Fourth and Fifth men of the Cambridge spy ring – one of whom, Kim Philby, announced his (disproven) innocence in a house that happened to back onto Cresswell Place; and the ‘treacherous’ coup that Harold Wilson feared in 1968. Powerful men with an excessive regard for their own intelligence have been known to make stupid decisions. Truth is always stranger than fiction.
I invented a lot, but not the way the Queen was received in France or the USA. From Eleanor Roosevelt’s diary, 26 October, 1957:
Queen Elizabeth’s visit to the United States, I think, has done much to eliminate some of the bitterness that resulted when this country allowed the Suez crisis to occur and then said we knew nothing of what our allies were doing.
It always seemed to me that this was a rather lame excuse, since Great Britain and France were our allies and it indicated that our communication must have deteriorated to a point which is not permitted among friends. I hope we will never again indulge in such negligence.
Now that the Queen has done all she can to repair the damage, I hope we will do what we can to restore the warmth of the British-American relationship which is, I think, essential to the strength of the West.
As I looked at the young Queen and her husband, Prince Philip, on their visit to New York, it seemed that she was filling her role with great dignity but also with some weariness. How very young this couple looked – and how we do make our visitors work!
In 1959, Princess Margaret bought the Poltimore Tiara at auction. She wore it on her wedding day in 1960 to a society photographer called Anthony Armstrong-Jones. He had taken the official photograph of the Queen and Princess Anne reading together, to mark the young princess’s birthday in 1957. The print was made on 10 October, shortly before the Queen left for her trip to Canada and the United States.
Readers of the same vintage as me may have grown up with the Jennings stories of Anthony Buckeridge. Long before the days of Harry Potter, they recounted the adventures of a (very non-magical) boy at a British boarding school. Growing up far away in Hong Kong at the time, I devoured them. And so, I have borrowed the names of Jennings’s friends Darbishire (spelled this way) and Venables, in honour of the real Chief Inspector George Jennings of the Kensington division, whose team solved the Rillington Place Murders in the 1950s. His subordinate, Inspector James Black, successfully led the early part of the investigation and it is in Black’s honour that Darbishire is a mere DI, but the relationship between my inspector and Venables does not reflect the far more respectful one between the real Metropolitan Police officers.
As I researched the Special Operations Executive, and also murders in and around Chelsea and Kensington in the 1950s, I discovered that two female wartime heroines were murdered there, one by a stalker, one unsolved. The first was Krystyna Skarbek, known as Christine Granville, a Polish agent in the SOE with an extraordinary war record, who was reduced to menial jobs afterwards, before being killed in Earl’s Court in 1952 by a jealous man who had worked as a fellow steward on an ocean liner. The second was Teresa Lubienska, a seventy-three-year-old Polish countess who had been in the Polish Underground Army and survived two concentration camps, and was stabbed by an unknown assailant at Gloucester Road tube station in 1957. Both should have been hailed as heroes. Instead, they led difficult post-war lives and only now is their heroism being fully appreciated, as female historians and writers take on the task of bringing to light what they did. I learned a lot from Mission France by Kate Vigurs, first published in 2022.