The royals - Kitty Kelley [77]
She skipped her son’s first birthday to be with her husband, who was on naval duty in Malta. Leaving the little boy at home with his grandparents and nannies for several months, she missed his first step and his first tooth. His first word was not “Mama,” but “Nana,” the person closest to him, his beloved nanny. Elizabeth raised her children the way that she had been raised. As an infant she had been left with nannies for six months while her parents toured Australia and New Zealand, so she did not hesitate to leave her own children in the care of others. Occasionally she expressed a twinge of guilt.
“I don’t want someone else to raise my children,” she said before the birth of Princess Anne in 1950. Yet when her daughter was three months old, Elizabeth left her in the Palace nursery so she could travel with her husband. When the little girl had her tonsils and adenoids removed, her nanny took her to the Hospital for Sick Children and spent the night at her bedside. Her mother, not overly concerned, stayed at Windsor Castle.
“Royalty regard their children like cattle,” wrote John Gordon in the Daily Express after learning that the Queen stayed in bed the night Prince Charles was rushed to London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital for an emergency appendectomy at midnight. “People didn’t like the Queen’s failure to go to Prince Charles’s bedside when he was suffering,” wrote Gordon.
In 1952, when Elizabeth became the new Queen, she struggled to make room in her life for her family, but she no longer had time to be a mother. Instead she dedicated herself to the Crown and postponed having more children.
As the new sovereign, she knew she had to reign—to travel the world, make state visits, welcome world leaders, consult Parliament, deliver speeches, accept salutes, cut ribbons, bestow knight-hoods—and try to smile.
The obsessive-compulsive child, once described by her governess as “too methodical and tidy… too dutiful for her own good,” took over as she buried herself in the duties of the monarchy. “I didn’t have an apprenticeship,” she said later. “My father died much too young. It was all a very sudden kind of taking on, and making the best job you can….” She became zealous about answering her mail, making her speeches, doing her boxes, which held the government documents sent to her every day.
“Oh, those boxes,” said a former courtier many years later. “It was all too easy for her to say, ‘I’ve got two red boxes upstairs, that’s my constitutional duty, and I’d really rather do that than have a row with my son, daughter, or husband.’ Red boxes are a marvelous escape from family problems.”
Publicly Elizabeth looked like the ideal mother. Pictures of her with her handsome husband and her two young children appeared regularly in newspapers and magazines. She learned from her clever mother, who, as Queen, had authorized books such as The Family Life of Queen Elizabeth. She also arranged newspaper photo spreads called “Our Little Princesses at Home” and “Playtime at Royal Lodge” to foster the image of an idyllic royal family. Naturally Elizabeth grew up considering such orchestrated coverage a vital marketing tool for the monarchy. She felt that posing for photos was part of her job as Queen, and her husband felt the same way. “If you are really going to have a monarchy,” he said, “you have got to have a family, and the family has got to be in the public eye.”
Reordering her priorities, the Queen now placed the monarchy first, her marriage second, and her children third. “I think any idea of a family in the normal sense was knocked on the head by the Queen’s accession at such an early age,” said biographer Philip Ziegler. “I don’t think it was ever in her nature to be a close parent, but in any case, it became impossible once she was swept up into the merry-go-round of royal activities.”
Still, she tried not to give up all her maternal responsibilities.