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

and its obsession with class status’. At this time the Group Captain was the equerry to the King, and had applied (unsuccessfully) to be a Conservative parliamentary candidate, neither the hallmark of a rebel.

      Halfway through 1948, the Princess shed the ‘Rose’ in Margaret Rose. It seems to have been her way of declaring that she was no longer a little girl but a young woman, a transition greeted with a certain lasciviousness by some of her biographers.

      ‘Never before had there been a Princess like her. Though she had a sophistication and charisma far in advance of her years, she was young, sensual and stunningly beautiful,’ observes Christopher Warwick. ‘With her vivid blue eyes … and lips that were described as both “generous” and “sensitive”, she was acknowledged to be one of the greatest beauties of her generation. In addition, she was curvaceous, extremely proud of her eighteen-inch waist … unpredictable, irrepressible and coquettish.’

      Phwoarr! Tim Heald is equally smitten: ‘At eighteen, she was beautiful, sexy … the drop-dead gorgeous personification of everything a princess was supposed to be.’ Furthermore, she was ‘a pocket Venus … an almost impossibly glamorous figure’.

      Her emergence into adulthood had its drawbacks. She was burdened with a succession of royal duties, most of them bottom-drawer and dreary. ‘The opening of the pumping station went very well in spite of the gale that was blowing,’ she wrote in a letter that year to her demanding grandmother, Queen Mary. ‘I am afraid that one photographer rather overdid things by taking a picture of me with my eyes shut.’ A little later, she oversaw the official opening of the Sandringham Company Girl Guides’ hut. The speech she delivered reflects the nature of the occasion:

      Looking around me, I can imagine how hard Miss Musselwhite and the company must have worked … I do congratulate you on the charming appearance of your new meeting place. I have been in the movement ten years as a Brownie, a Guide and a Sea Ranger … I have now great pleasure in declaring this hut open.

      At the same time, her elder sister was opening bridges, launching ships, taking parades and welcoming foreign dignitaries.

      From now on, would Margaret have to measure her life in scout huts and pumping stations? Was that all there was? As her day job as her sister’s stand-in grew ever more mundane, who could blame her if she looked for excitement elsewhere?

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      ‘Without realising it,’ Peter Townsend writes of autumn 1948, when he was chosen to accompany the Princess to Amsterdam for the inauguration of Queen Juliana, ‘I was being carried a little further from home, a little nearer to the Princess.’

      In August 1950, Townsend’s ongoing rebellion against the British Establishment continued along its mysterious path with his appointment as assistant master of the royal household, a promotion that elevated him to a smart carpeted office on the south side of Buckingham Palace, ‘a little paradise compared with the gloomy equerry’s room’. At home, though, ‘conjugal life, practically, emotionally and sentimentally, had come to a standstill’.

      Not so his enchantment with the Princess, who was now within an inch of her twentieth birthday. Townsend was entranced. ‘If her extravagant vivacity sometimes outraged the elder members of the household and of London society, it was contagious to those who still felt young,’ he writes, adding, a touch dolefully, ‘whether they were or not.’

      Written when he was in his sixties, his memories of the young Princess retain their sense of wonder. ‘She was a girl of unusual, intense beauty, confined as it was in her short, slender figure and centred about large purple-blue eyes, generous lips and a complexion as smooth as a peach. She was capable, in her face and in her whole being, of an astonishing power of expression. It could change in an instant from saintly, almost melancholic, composure to hilarious, uncontrollable joy. She was, by nature, generous, volatile … She was coquettish, sophisticated. But what ultimately made Princess Margaret so attractive and lovable was that behind the dazzling facade, the apparent self-assurance, you could find, if you looked for it, a rare softness and sincerity. She could make you bend double with laughing; she could also touch you deeply.’ No one else, before or since, has written about the Princess in quite such adoring terms.

      By this time, a group of bright young blades surrounded the Princess. Townsend looked on with a sense of yearning, perhaps even entitlement. ‘I dare say that there was not one among them more touched by the Princess’s joie de vivre than I, for, in my present marital predicament, it gave me what I most lacked – joy. More, it created a sympathy between us and I began to sense that, in her life too, there was something lacking.’

      While Princess Margaret admitted to having fallen in love with the Group Captain in the spring of 1947, when she was sixteen years old, Townsend claims to have noticed the first spark in their romance over four years later, in August 1951, following a picnic lunch in the middle of a day’s shooting. He was dozing in the heather when he became aware that someone was covering him with a coat. ‘I opened one eye – to see Princess Margaret’s lovely face, very close, looking into mine. Then I opened the other eye, and saw, behind her, the King.’ At this point, Townsend whispered to the Princess, ‘You know your father is watching us?’ In response she laughed, straightened up, and went over to her father’s side. ‘Then she took his arm and walked away,’ adds Townsend, ‘leaving me to my dreams.’

      King George VI died early the following year. The Princess had been devoted to him, and he to her. ‘Lilibet is my pride. Margaret is my joy,’ he once said, adding on another occasion, ‘She is able to charm the pearl out of an oyster.’ Lilibet was dutiful and serious; Margaret wilful and fun. ‘She it was who could always make her father laugh, even when he was angry with her,’ wrote John Wheeler-Bennett, the official biographer of George VI. On one occasion she interrupted a telling-off by saying, ‘Papa, do you sing, “God Save My Gracious Me”?’ The King had burst out laughing, and all was forgiven.

      His death hit her hard. ‘It was a terrible blow for Princess Margaret,’ a friend remembered. ‘She worshipped him and it was also the first time that anything really ghastly had happened to her.’ Margaret confirmed this to Ben Pimlott, the biographer of her sister: ‘After the King’s death there was an awful sense of being in a black hole. I remember feeling tunnel-visioned and didn’t really notice things.’ In her grief, did she seek refuge in love?

      After the King’s death, everyone moved up or down a notch: Queen Elizabeth became Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, Princess Elizabeth became Queen Elizabeth II, and Townsend was appointed comptroller of the Queen Mother’s household. Only Margaret stayed the same, but now she had to live alone with her mother in Clarence House, eclipsed and to some extent marginalised by her sister, the new Queen, and with no clear role of her own.

      The following December, after eleven years of marriage, nine of them in the service of the Royal Family, Peter Townsend divorced Rosemary, who was named as the guilty party. Two months later she married John de Lázsló, son of the fashionable society painter Philip de Lázsló.

      That winter, according to Townsend, he and the Princess found themselves alone in the Red Drawing Room of Windsor Castle. They spoke for hours on end. ‘It was then,’ he writes, ‘that we made the mutual discovery of how much we meant to one another. She listened, without uttering a word, as I told her, very quietly, of my feelings. Then she simply said: “That is exactly how I feel, too.”’

Or that’s how his story goes. But had this impetuous young woman really managed to hide her feelings for a full five and a half years? And had the Group Captain somehow exercised a similar restraint?*

      According to Townsend, they pursued their romance in the open air, walking or riding, always ‘a discreet but adequate distance’ from the rest of the party. ‘We talked. Her understanding, far beyond her years, touched me and helped me; with her wit she, more than anyone else, knew how to make me laugh – and laughter, between boy and girl, often