The Old Un’s Notes The girl who would be Queen
To celebrate the Platinum Jubilee, A N Wilson has written a charming book, Lilibet: The Girl Who Would Be Queen. Wilson imagines the Queen on the eve of her Jubilee this year, thinking back to her childhood. His tone is pitch-perfect as he remembers little Lilibet and ‘Grandfather England’ (George V), who hated ‘that damned mouse’ – ie Mickey Mouse. Wilson is a mere whippersnapper, born in 1950, but he has an ear for the cadences and jokes of the little Princess Elizabeth, as she compares Wallis Simpson to Olive Oyl. He also makes jokes about how the Princess prefigures her life as Queen. The little girl refers to the Abdication year of 1936, when ‘everything turned rather horribilis’. This isn’t the first time Wilson has tackled the young Princess. In 1984, he published Lilibet, a poem with these poignant lines on the Abdication Crisis: Later the stricken mother would endeavour To break the news to her bewilder’d child. ‘Your Uncle David, usually so clever, Has been by an American
beguil’d. He must away’. ‘Oh – Mummie, not forever?’ Bravely, and through her tears, the Duchess smil’d. And while the Duchess with her daughter frets, Downstairs, the air is thick with cigarettes. 16th April would have been Kingsley Amis’s 100th birthday. And 9th August would have been the 100th birthday of Philip Larkin, his old friend from St John’s College, Oxford. In the latest issue of the magazine About Larkin, published by the Philip Larkin
Society, there’s a selection of Kingsley Amis’s table talk. It was recorded by a friend of Amis, Tom Miller, in restaurants in the 1980s and ’90s. The Old Un has enjoyed Miller’s reminiscences of Kingers before. And he loves the new batch. Apparently Amis thought Princess Diana was ‘wicked’, Edward Heath and Roy Jenkins were ‘pompous buffoons’, and as for Danny Kaye: ‘Oh, Christ! Oh God! Bad at being a human being. Full of schmaltz.’ Amis says of John Osborne, ‘My heart sank when he came into the room.’ Peter
Among this month’s contributors Anne Robinson (p19) has left Countdown ‘to make way for an older woman’. She was on The Weakest Link. She hopes to become a dutiful Cotswolds housewife even though, for obvious reasons, she isn’t married. Nigel Havers (p25) was in Chariots of Fire, A Passage to India and Empire of the Sun. He starred in The Charmer. He has been in Downton Abbey and Coronation Street. Jamie Blackett (p30), a former army officer, farms in Dumfriesshire. He writes for the Daily Telegraph and Country Life. He wrote The Enigma of Kidson, Red Rag to a Bull and Land of Milk and Honey. Bel Mooney (p32) is a novelist, children’s author, broadcaster and journalist. She is the advice columnist at the Daily Mail. She lives halfway between Bath and Bristol and, when not writing, studies and collects art.
Ustinov was ‘merit-free and talent-free’. Of poor Shirley Williams, Amis said, ‘People think that she is sincere because her clothes are a mess and she doesn’t get her hair done.’ He did like Yul Brynner, who ‘gave an immense amount of pleasure to millions of people’, Daphne du Maurier, Ian Fleming, Dick Francis and Graham Greene (‘He can write, damn him!’). The most impressive people he’d ever met were Hungarian historian Tibor Szamuely, writer Robert Conquest and Philip Larkin – ‘Of course, he’s better than me.’ The person he most hated was the Queen Mother: ‘She was once very rude to me.’ Amis didn’t spare himself from his own attacks. He said he was taken seriously as a novelist only ‘because there is so little competition’. If only dear Kingers were around to give his frank opinions on today’s leading figures. As the Queen celebrates her Platinum Jubilee, what news of her fellow lady veterans from the war? The young Princess Elizabeth joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) in 1945, aged 18, as a Subaltern. By the end of the war, she was a Junior Commander. Having completed her course at No 1 Mechanical Training Centre, she passed out as a fully qualified driver. The Oldie June 2022 5
