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

and handwriting, and there were lots of others addressed to the King and Queen, so they were quite old. The Princess never said why she was doing it, but she was very determined that they should all be destroyed, thousands of them. I remember thinking we were putting a match to history.’*

* A coincidence.

* Her house in Windsor Great Park.

* Princess Margaret could be frosty with servants. Princess Diana’s butler, Paul Burrell, claims that, on returning from an engagement, she would touch the television, testing it for warmth, just in case the servants had been watching when her back was turned.

* Following Margaret’s death in 2002, Griffin was made redundant, and ordered out of his Kensington Palace tied cottage within forty-two days. Until that point he had been earning £1,500 a month. There had been no shift system, and he was never paid overtime. Furious at his forced redundancy, he refused a Royal Service Medal. He now lives in a flat on the Isle of Wight, decorated with a mixture of reclining semi-nudes, press cuttings about Princess Margaret’s cars and a large photograph of a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow he bought for himself from the royal fleet. He fitted it with the numberplate HRH 8N, which he bought from a dealer. He financed these purchases by selling a bundle of cards and notes from Princess Diana for £10,500, among them a cartoon of two sperm declaring that they were swimming down someone’s throat. ‘Di and I used to compete to send the sauciest cards to each other, you see.’

       14

      ‘We are born in a clear field, and we die in a dark forest,’ goes the Russian proverb. For fifteen years – from the age of two to seventeen – Princess Margaret was looked after by a governess, Marion Crawford; for both of them, this was their clear field.

      Marion Crawford – always known to the Royal Family as ‘Crawfie’ – was born in Ayrshire in 1909. She studied to be a teacher, with the aim of becoming a child psychologist. She wanted to help the poorest members of society, and ‘to do something about the misery and unhappiness I saw all around me’.

      But a chance meeting diverted her from this calling. The Countess of Elgin asked her to teach history to her seven-year-old son, Andrew. Crawfie became the victim of her own success: impressed by her teaching skills, the Countess persuaded her to stay on to teach her other three children, and then recommended her to Lady Rose Leveson-Gower, who was after a tutor for her daughter Mary. Mary later remembered Crawfie as ‘a lovely country girl, who was a very good teacher’.

      And so the ball was set rolling. In turn, Lady Rose recommended her to the then Duchess of York, who needed a governess for her little daughters Princess Elizabeth, aged five, and Princess Margaret Rose, aged two.

      The interview went swimmingly. Crawfie found the Duchess of York the homeliest of women. ‘There was nothing alarmingly fashionable about her,’ she recalled. ‘Her hair was done in a way that suited her admirably, with a little fringe over her forehead.’ Royal historians have credited, or discredited, Marion Crawford with obsequious, saccharine observations, but that initial view of her future employer surely has a sharp edge to it, with its needle-like suggestion of frumpiness.

      The Duchess sat plumply by the window at that first meeting: ‘The blue of her dress, I remember, exactly matched the sky behind her that morning and the blue of her eyes.’ It’s an eerie image, suggesting a disembodied royal, her dress merging into the sky, and with holes where her eyes should have been.

      So Crawfie was taken on as governess, and moved into 145 Piccadilly, the London residence of the Duke and Duchess of York and their two little Princesses. After a day or two, she was presented to His Majesty King George V. In a loud booming voice – ‘rather terrifying to children and young ladies’ – the King barked, ‘For goodness sake, teach Margaret and Lilibet to write a decent hand, that’s all I ask you. Not one of my children can write properly. They all do it exactly the same way. I like a hand with character in it.’

      (Bettmann/Getty Images)

On her arrival, Crawfie had been aware of a widespread rumour that little Princess Margaret Rose was rarely seen in public because there was something wrong with her. ‘One school of thought had it that she was deaf and dumb, a notion not without its humour to those who knew her.’* The rumour was eventually dispelled by news of a bright remark the little Princess had made over tea at Glamis Castle with the playwright J.M. Barrie. Barrie had asked Margaret if a last biscuit was his or hers. ‘It is yours and mine,’ replied Margaret. Barrie inserted the line into his play The Boy David, and rewarded Margaret with a penny for each time it was spoken onstage.

      From the start, Crawfie found her two charges very different. Elizabeth was organised, Margaret artistic; Elizabeth discreet, Margaret attention-seeking; Elizabeth dutiful, Margaret disobedient; Elizabeth disciplined, Margaret wild. ‘Margaret was a great joy and a diversion, but Lilibet had a natural grace of her own … Lilibet was the one with the temper, but it was under control. Margaret was often naughty, but she had a gay bouncing way with her which was hard to deal with. She would often defy me with a sidelong look, make a scene and kiss and be friends and all forgiven and forgotten. Lilibet took longer to recover, but she had always the more dignity of the two.’

      The relationship between the two little Princesses was already set. ‘Lilibet was very motherly with her younger sister. I used to think at one time she gave in to her rather more than was good for Margaret. Sometimes she would say to me, in her funny responsible manner, “I really don’t know what we are going to do with Margaret, Crawfie.”’

      Margaret’s Christmas present list for 1936 – their first Christmas in Buckingham Palace – shows how the elder sister took the younger in hand. Lilibet, aged ten, wrote it to remind Margaret, aged six, who would be expecting Thank You letters from her, and for what.

      See-saw – Mummie

      Dolls with dresses – Mummie

      Umbrella – Papa

      Teniquoit – Papa

      Brooch – Mummie

      Calendar – Grannie

      Silver Coffee Pot, Clock, Puzzle – Lilibet to Margaret

      Pen and Pencil – Equerry

      China Field Mice – M.E.

      Bag and Cricket Set – Boforts

      China lamb – Linda

      Far from being wholly anodyne, Crawfie’s memoir, The Little Princesses, is peppered with intimations of a perilous future for Margaret. Did Lilibet also sense that her younger sister might be in for a bumpy ride? ‘All her feeling for her pretty sister was motherly and protective. She hated Margaret to be left out; she hated her antics to be misunderstood. In her own intuitive fashion I think she saw ahead how later on Margaret was bound to be misrepresented and misunderstood. How often in early days have I heard her cry in real anguish, “Stop her, Mummie. Oh, please stop her,” when Margaret was being more than usually preposterous and amusing and outrageous. Though Lilibet, with the rest of us, laughed at Margaret’s antics – and indeed it was impossible not to – I think they often made her uneasy and filled her with foreboding.’

      Of course, prescience benefits greatly from hindsight. By the time she wrote her book, Crawfie knew how the story was developing. Nevertheless, Margaret was only nineteen when The Little Princesses