On 29 January 1947, the Queen and Princess Elizabeth came to St Mark’s in Mayfair to attend my marriage to Eric Penn. On the following day they set sail on HMS Vanguard for South Africa where King George VI and the Queen, accompanied by their two daughters, were to make a historic tour of the region at a pivotal moment not just in the history of the union of South Africa, but of the British Empire itself.
Princess Elizabeth and I were both born in 1926 within three months of one another, but our paths did not cross until I became engaged to Eric. He was comptroller of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office in the Queen’s household and I became a lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother.
Nobody under the age of 70 can remember a sovereign other than Queen Elizabeth II, and probably finds it hard to imagine her before her accession – as a young and very beautiful girl living with Prince Philip the relatively normal life of a happily married couple with two young children.
Her children and ours were more or less of the same age. There were tea parties in each other’s houses and weekly visits to Buckingham Palace, where ‘Miss Vacani’ taught them to dance. When people say that the Queen didn’t have time to be with her children, they are talking nonsense.
On one occasion when the Queen was staying with us in Suffolk, we went for a walk along the banks of the river Alde. Below the 12th-century church of St Botolph at Iken we met a woman walking her dog, which happened to be a corgi. Her Majesty was a magnet to dogs, and it made straight for her.
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