“Having been recently launched off the bow of the Ark Royal in a Sea Vixen,” Julian Christopher had quipped, “in a force eight gale, today’s adventure was grist to the mill, sir.”
It hadn’t been lost on Julian Christopher that of all the members of the presentation line the most nervous had been the Angry Widow. She’d been preoccupied with checking her makeup in her compact mirror, visibly unsettled just before she was introduced to the Queen. It was as if she’d thought through every other aspect of this peculiar expedition to Royal Deeside but for the mechanics of actually meeting the Monarch. Which was profoundly logical in a funny sort of way. How does one prepare oneself for such a unique encounter?
Margaret Thatcher had been a little disconcerted when the Queen sympathised with her — one mother to another — for her having to leave her twins in Cheltenham for to make the journey to Balmoral.
The Prime Minister’s party hadn’t arrived at the heavily guarded royal estate until late the previous evening. There’d been no ceremony and the visitors had found themselves ushered directly to the ‘guest wing’ of the castle. The Queen had already retired to bed and it had been a long, wearying day for the travellers. Standing in the presentation line that morning Julian Christopher was struck by the oddness of the event, the unlikely niceties meticulously conforming to the vestiges of a court life that was already a thing of the past. This was his eighth visit to Balmoral; his first for several years. Previously, he’d attended in the capacity of Admiral of the Fleet, Lord Mountbatten of Burma’s senior aide-de-camp. Apart from the barbed wire all around the estate and the machine gun positions he’d observed at the main gate he’d opened his curtains that morning to be greeted with a wholly familiar, albeit faded green vista out of his first floor bedroom windows. At breakfast; toast, thin marmalade and muddy tea, he’d watched two armoured cars — machine gun armed Daimler Ferrets — draw up outside the main house and the Black Watch guard change. Most of the soldiers carried Sten Guns and side arms, a few hefted long-barrelled Browning fifty calibre sniping pieces.
After the presentations had concluded the Queen ushered her Prime Minister to a private room while her husband jovially herded the rest of the party into a reception room commanding a view of the breathtaking country to the south and west of the castle.
Julian Christopher found himself standing next to Margaret Thatcher, a little outside the circle of conversation of Sir Alec Douglas Home, Tom Harding-Grayson and the Duke of Edinburgh. Patricia Harding-Grayson had returned to her room, her duty as a supernumerary having now been performed.
“Of course,” Margaret Thatcher remarked, “Balmoral is not really a ‘castle’.”
The man was so taken aback that his companion was making ‘small talk’ that he was momentarily lost for a suitable reply.
“But I’m sure you are much more familiar with the history and the traditions of this place that I,” the woman went on. “I didn’t realise it was so far from the nearest town, I confess.”
The Prime Minister’s party had been flown from RAF Dyce to the Balmoral estate on two Wessex helicopters, both flying low and at breakneck speeds at little more than tree top height all the way.
“The estate itself goes back hundreds of years,” he replied, finding his tongue. “I seem to recollect somebody telling me it comprises some fifty thousand acres, give or take.”
“Fascinating,” the Angry Widow said in such a way that the man was convinced she meant it.
“Lord Mountbatten was a bit of a fiend for the fact and figures.”
“You and he were very close, I understand?”
Julian Christopher hesitated. Louis Mountbatten wasn’t an easy man to be close to. Like most great men he’d had a marvellously keen eye for the main chance and known exactly when to withdraw his patronage from an underling who’d in some way let him down or failed to come up to his unrealistically high expectations. Mountbatten had never forgotten how badly the British establishment had treated his father. Prince Louis Alexander of Battenberg had been driven out of the Admiralty in October 1914 on account of his German birth despite a lifetime’s exemplary and unstinting loyal service to the Royal Navy and the British Empire. When eventually, in 1954, his son Louis — the Battenbergs changed their name to Mountbatten during the Great War- became First Sea Lord in 1954 it was as if somehow, the wrongs of the past had been acknowledged and their poison finally neutralised. The injustice done to his father all those years ago had driven Louis Mountbatten all his life. The man whom the Royal Household called ‘Uncle Louis’ was in fact Prince Philip’s grand-uncle, since the Duke of Edinburgh was a grandson of his father, Prince Louis of Battenberg. Mountbatten had appointed himself his grand-nephew’s mentor and since the Queen’s accession to the throne in 1952, become an integral part of the Royal Family. The old man had been a friend of Edward VIII when he’d been the darling of the nation as the gallant, fast living oddly human — if mostly in his fallibilities — Prince of Wales who’d seemed somehow in touch with the ordinary man and woman during the dreadful years of the Depression. He’d been no such thing and when he’d had to decide between his duty to the Empire and his own personal peccadilloes, the latter had prevailed and he’d abdicated the throne, causing an irreparable breach between the two men. Thereafter, Louis Mountbatten had made it his personal business to ensure that the carefree, devil may care young naval officer — the then Prince Philip of Greece — never made the same mistake…
“Admiral?”
The man realised he’d become trapped in his thoughts.
“Forgive me,” he quirked a grimace of a smile. “I was thinking of Lord Mountbatten. Like everybody else, I try to pretend that what happened last year was just a bad dream. But when one remembers an old friend, or a family member who is no longer with us…”
“We all carry on as best we can,” Margaret Thatcher agreed. “The only thing that we must never do is forget.”
“Quite,” Julian Christopher nodded. “We were talking about Balmoral,” he recapped, thinking aloud as he re-ordered his scattered thoughts. Although it wasn’t impossible to achieve high command in the Royal Navy without being a social animal who was as accomplished with a cocktail stick as with a cutlass, it was unlikely that a wallflower unable to make polite conversation at the drop of a hat would ever again reach the pinnacle of the Service. Over the years he’d learned to tolerate fools in high places and become a tolerable party animal. He’d carefully honed his small talk, collected a library of anecdotes and quips for all occasions. People often asked him about Balmoral and despite his reservations on this occasion and in front of this woman, he dutifully trotted out his pre-prepared party piece.
“Balmoral ‘Castle’,” he declaimed wryly, “in which we are now standing, is less a castle than a very large estate house designed by the renowned Aberdonian architect William Smith for Queen Victoria. I say ‘designed by’ advisedly. I believe the poor man was distracted to the point of despair by Prince Albert’s modifications to ‘his design’ for the house. The house wasn’t completed until 1856. Here it remains; a prime example of a style known as Scots Baronial; a style of architecture with origins in the sixteenth century, combining elements of medieval castles and tower houses with features reminiscent of a French Renaissance châteaux. I’ve always felt Balmoral was never one thing or the other, a peculiar mixture of only vaguely compatible parts. Scots Baronial was pioneered by such Scottish cultural luminaries as Sir Walter Scott and flourished in the nineteenth century during something of a Gothic Revival that was mercifully snuffed out by the First World War…”