Margaret used her imagination in more pragmatic ways, too, employing an imaginary friend called Cousin Halifax, ‘of whom she made every use when she wanted to be tiresome. Nothing was Margaret’s fault; Cousin Halifax was entirely to blame for tasks undone and things forgotten. “I was busy with Cousin Halifax,” she would say haughtily, watching me out of the corner of her eye to see if I looked like swallowing that excuse.’
Little Margaret was also ‘a great one for practical jokes’. Like most, hers contained an element of sadism, particularly when perpetrated on those who couldn’t answer back. ‘More than once I have seen an equerry put his hand into his pocket, and find it, to his amazement, full of sticky lime balls … Shoes left outside doors would become inexplicably filled with acorns.’ Later, she was to marry a fellow practical joker, one of whose pranks was to secrete dead fish in women’s beds.
For now, Margaret was developing a talent for mimicry, generally sharpened on her elder sister. Lilibet was, at that time, afflicted with a condition which these days would probably be diagnosed as obsessive-compulsive disorder. In later life she could channel it into waving, cutting ribbons, asking strangers how far they had travelled, and so on and so forth, but in those early years it was more of a problem than a solution. ‘At one time I got quite anxious about Lilibet and her fads,’ wrote Crawfie. ‘She became almost too methodical and tidy. She would hop out of bed several times a night to get her shoes quite straight, her clothes arranged just so.’
Crawfie was convinced that the best cure lay not in sympathy, but mockery. ‘We soon laughed her out of this. I remember one hilarious session we had with Margaret imitating her sister going to bed. It was not the first occasion, or the last, on which Margaret’s gift of caricature came in very handy.’
For all Margaret’s joie de vivre – perhaps because of it – people felt more comfortable with Lilibet than with her little sister. One elderly man in Scotland was devoted to Lilibet, but, says Crawfie, ‘he was frightened of Margaret. Old men often were. She had too witty a tongue and too sharp a way with her, and I think they one and all felt they would probably be the next on her list of caricatures! Poor little Margaret! This misunderstanding of her light-hearted fun and frolics was often to get her into trouble long after schoolroom days were done.’
Her lifelong love of keeping others waiting was already evident in adolescence; so was her easy, almost eager, acceptance of the privilege bestowed upon her at birth. ‘Like all young girls, she went through a phase when she could be extremely tiresome. She would dawdle over her dressing, pleased to know she kept us waiting.’ Crawfie hoped she had cured this shortcoming, but evidently not. On one occasion, ‘at adolescence’s most tiresome stage’, when Margaret was ‘apt at times to be comically regal and overgracious’, Lilibet’s suitor Philip, nine years Margaret’s senior, decided to take her down a peg or two. ‘Philip wasn’t having any. She would dilly-dally outside the lift, keeping everyone waiting, until Philip, losing patience, would give her a good push that settled the question of precedence quite simply.’ Crawfie makes free with the adjectives ‘tiresome’ and ‘regal’, but she only ever applies them to Margaret, never Lilibet. For Lilibet, life was all about doing the right thing. For Margaret it was, and would always be, much more of a performance.
* Late in life, Jessica Mitford admitted that as a young woman she had tried to spread the rumour that both the Queen and Princess Margaret had been born with webbed feet, which was why nobody had ever seen them with their shoes off. Auberon Waugh attempted to play a similar trick with the children of Princess Anne and Captain Mark Phillips, noting in his Private Eye diary that young Peter Phillips had four legs, and ‘the mysterious Baby Susan … is said to have grown a long yellow beak, black feathers and to croak like a raven’.
December 1941
The two Princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret, stage a Nativity play in St George’s Hall at Windsor Castle. Elizabeth, in a gold crown and velvet tunic, is one of the Three Kings. The other two are played by evacuees; one of them has cocoa rubbed all over his face for his role as the Black King. The eleven-year-old Margaret plays the Little Child in the shepherd’s hut. She sings ‘Gentle Jesus, Meek and Mild’ in what her governess describes as ‘a most beautifully clear voice’.
December 1942
Prompted by last year’s success, the Princesses decide to stage a pantomime, Cinderella. The two girls argue about the price of admission. ‘You can’t ask people to pay seven and sixpence … No one will pay that to look at us!’ says Elizabeth.
‘Nonsense!’ counters Margaret. ‘They’ll pay anything to see us.’
Margaret grabs the title role for herself. ‘Margaret had long since made up her mind she would be Cinderella. Lilibet was principal boy,’ notes Crawfie. During rehearsals, the King complains that he can’t hear a word anyone is saying. He also complains that Elizabeth’s tunic is too short. ‘Lilibet cannot possibly wear that.’
But it is a great success on the night, with the younger sister the star of the show. ‘Margaret brought the house down,’ notes Crawfie.
1 June 1954
Denied by protocol the chance to tread the boards in public, the twenty-three-year-old Princess Margaret accepts the position of assistant director for a production of Edgar Wallace’s thriller The Frog. It is performed for charity for three nights at the Scala Theatre* in Charlotte Street, W1, by thirty young amateurs drawn from the upper classes, and stars Maureen, Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava, as a lavatory attendant, the Duke of Devonshire as a prison governor, the Hon. Colin Tennant* in the title role (a serial killer), Billy Wallace as a police sergeant, Henry Porchester as a Cockney detective, and Mrs Gerald Legge as the heroine. Experts in these matters estimate that ten members of the company are titled, and a further ten are the children of peers.
The first-night audience is very nearly as grand, and includes Baroness Alix de Rothschild, Prince Aly Khan, Noël Coward, the Duke and Duchess of Argyll, Professor Isaiah Berlin and Sir Bernard and Lady Docker, whose famous gold-plated Daimler is parked in a side street, guarded by a policeman. At the close of the show Princess Margaret makes a brief speech, telling the audience that they ought to give the cast ‘a jolly good round of applause’.
Backstage, the cast consider the play a whopping success, and reminisce among themselves about the hilarious moments when lines were fluffed and cues forgotten. They remain unaware that some members of the audience are less amused, among them Noël Coward. ‘The whole evening was one of the most fascinating exhibitions of incompetence, conceit and bloody impertinence I have ever seen in my life … the entire cast displayed no talent whatsoever,’ he confides to his diary. ‘It was certainly a strong moral lesson for all of us never to be nervous again on opening nights. Those high-born characters we watched mumbling and stumbling about the stage are the ones who come to our productions and criticise us! They at least displayed no signs of nervousness; they were unequivocally delighted with themselves from the first scene to the last, which, I may add, was a very long time indeed.’
After the show, Coward goes backstage to shower the cast and its assistant director with unheartfelt praise. To his diary, he confides that he found Princess Margaret tucking into foie gras sandwiches and sipping