Free Wartime Princess by Valerie Wilding Page A

cousins.

January 7th 1943
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    Lilibet’s on again about doing her bit.
    â€˜Papa doesn’t want me to be a nurse,’ she said when I went into her bedroom to borrow a book about Guides, ‘so I must think of something else to do, that he can’t say no to.’
    â€˜Lilibet, he can say no to anything,’ I told her. ‘He’s our father.’
    â€˜But surely he can understand,’ she said. ‘He and Mummy do their bit, in their way. Oh, I know,’ she said, holding up a hand to stop me interrupting, ‘we do our knitting and salvaging, but it’s not the same and you know it.’
    Snappy.
    I settled myself at her dressing table and fiddled with her pots and jars. ‘Let’s see, you could always be a bus conductress. It can’t be hard riding around all day selling tickets.’ I pretended to think. ‘Or you could be a Land Girl, and dig turnips, or get the harvest in while you milk the cows. Or–’
    She flounced out of the room, saying, ‘Don’t be so childish!’
    I think somebody hasn’t had a letter from Philip lately! He’s due to go to the Mediterranean, and he’s said that on his next leave, he’s staying with the Mountbattens. She’ll like that, because she’s bound to see him then. Uncle Dickie always brings him over if he can.
    I’ve received a large sum of money – £20,000 – from one of Granny’s friends. She left lots of jewels to Mummy. I’m to buy savings certificates with some of the money, and will put the rest in the bank. It would have been nice to spend some of it, but everyone says, ‘Be sensible,’ and that Mrs Greville wouldn’t want it wasted. I’m sure she wouldn’t mind if I bought myself a little treat. What would I buy? Sweets? Rationed. Clothes? Rationed. Oh, I know! I’d take the whole family on a train to the seaside, and we’d build sandcastles and paddle and swim and eat ice creams and that pink stuff – candy floss! Imagine, a whole day of nothing but fun, and no one taking our photographs and no hand-shaking or waving! We’d just be ourselves, like an ordinary family.

January 22nd
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    Such a terrible thing happened yesterday. A single German bomber swooped out of the sky and bombed a school south of London. I hope no one was hurt. When I hear about things like that, I feel as if someone’s squeezing my heart.
    It set Lilibet off again. ‘It means children in that area have no school any more. Oh, there’s so much work to do,’ she said. ‘I could help. Other girls my age are doing their bit. Why can’t I?’
    I could tell her why. She’s too important. I wonder if they’d let me do war work, if I was sixteen. The way this war’s going, I’ll find out in three years. It seems as if it will never end.

February 27th
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    Lilibet left Guides yesterday. She’s a Sea Ranger now. I want to be one, but Mummy says I’ve only been in Guides for five minutes.

March 5th
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    We looked through some of our photograph albums after lunch. Sometimes it’s hard to remember how things looked before the war, when there were no sandbags or air-raid shelters or bombed buildings. Lilibet said, ‘London used to look glorious on spring days like today,’ and gave a great sigh.
    Then we did a little complaining – nowhere near Mummy, of course! – and Lilibet promised everything will be lovely again one day.
    We really shouldn’t ever grumble. We haven’t been bombed out of our home. We don’t have to sleep in horrid underground tunnels. We have good food to eat and we don’t have to queue for bread.

April 22nd
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    Lilibet was seventeen yesterday, and I’ll soon be thirteen. Mummy says it’s sad that, because of the war, Lilibet can’t do half the things she’d normally be doing at her age. We have lots of