The royals - Kitty Kelley [56]
Elizabeth received the news without cracking. She walked slowly back to the lodge, where BoBo MacDonald was shining her shoes. Her personal dresser dropped to her knees in a deep curtsy. “Oh, no, BoBo,” she said. “You don’t have to do that.” Her lady-in-waiting, Pamela Mountbatten, rushed to give her a comforting hug.
“Oh, thank you,” said the new Queen. “But I am so sorry that it means we’ve got to go back to England and it’s upsetting everybody’s plans.”
Martin Charteris entered with the dreaded envelope containing the accession documents, which required the new sovereign’s name.
“I did what I had to do,” he recalled. “I addressed her: ‘The only question I have to ask you at this stage is, what do you wish to be called when you’re on the throne?’
“ ‘Oh, my own name, of course. Elizabeth. What else?’
“ ‘Right. Elizabeth. Elizabeth the Second.’ ”
Many years later Charteris characterized the new Queen’s reaction to her accession: “I remember seeing her moments after she became Queen—moments, not hours—and she seemed almost to reach out for it. There were no tears. She was just there, back braced, her color a little heightened. Just waiting for her destiny.
“It was quite different for Philip. He sat slumped behind a copy of the Times. He didn’t want it at all. It was going to change his whole life: take away the emotional stability he’d finally found.”
Charteris summoned the press to make the announcement about “the lady we must now call the Queen.” He asked photographers to respect her privacy by not taking her picture as she prepared to leave. The photographers complied and stood by the side of the road as she passed, holding their cameras limp in their left hands and their right hands held over their hearts. The people of Kenya lined the dirt road to the airport for a solid forty-mile line. Black Africans, brown Indians, and white Europeans, subjects all, bowed their heads in silent tribute.
“There was very little conversation on the flight back to London,” recalled John Dean. “BoBo and I sat together, with the royal couple immediately behind…. The Queen got up once or twice during the journey, and when she returned to her seat she looked as if she might have been crying.”
She was wearing the beige-and-white sundress she had on in Kenya and refused to put on mourning clothes until the very last minute. Upon landing, the Queen looked out the window and saw Prime Minister Churchill waiting with a clutch of elderly men in somber ration-book black suits and black armbands. She gasped when she saw the long line of black Daimler sedans.
“Oh, God,” she whispered to her lady-in-waiting. “They’ve brought the hearses.”
Composed, but unsure of what to do next, she turned to her husband.
“Shall I go down alone?”
“Yes,” he said, acknowledging her sudden preeminence. As his wife’s subject, he now was required to call her “ma’am” in public and walk four paces behind her.
Tears trickled down Churchill’s cheeks and he struggled for composure as he offered his condolences.
“A tragic homecoming,” said the Queen, “but a smooth flight.”
After shaking hands with the plane’s crew, and thanking each one, she stepped into the family Daimler and was driven to Clarence House, where Queen Mary, dressed in black, was waiting to pay her respects.
“Her old grannie and subject must be the first to kiss her hand,” said Queen Mary.
The eighty-five-year-old woman, who would die thirteen months later, set the royal standard for mourning. After burying her husband, King George V, and two of her five sons, she declared black to be the color of death and to be worn only for doing death’s duty. So the women of the House of Windsor never wore black except when grieving. “On royal trips, we always packed something black in the luggage in case news