Margaret and Lilibet looked at each other and then back at their mother. ‘Can we have hot dogs for dinner?’ they asked.

Chapter Forty

Dunfermline, 25^th July 1939

Marion was lying in bed in her old bedroom. It appeared to get smaller year by year, but the fading wallpaper of pink roses still made her smile. Her stepfather had put it up as a surprise for her homecoming, after a nasty bout of scarlet fever had hospitalized her. She remembered how weak she had been when her parents had collected her. Her stepfather had carried her up the stairs, and when she saw how he had transformed her room, she had cried, and clung to him.

Now she yawned and stretched.

It was day one of her summer holidays and she would see George in a couple of hours. She was glad to be out of London and away from the concern growing over Hitler’s Germany. She knew now that fascism was not about simply organizing a country well, and was ashamed that she had been so naïve to have thought so. It was about dictatorship and prejudice and violence. In Germany it was called National Socialism, or Nazism, and they were attacking Jewish people. The previous November Nazi soldiers, shamefully helped by German civilians, had smashed and burned Synagogues and Jewish homes all over Germany. The streets had been filled with broken glass and so it had been called Kristallnacht. Marion couldn’t bear that they had given a murderous night such a pretty name.

She rubbed her eyes. She knew more than she should, because Mr Chamberlain, the Prime Minister and his colleague, Mr Churchill, were at the Palace almost every day. What they had to say often filtered down to the servants’ hall via footmen. She hadn’t seen Tommy for a while, but he must be in the thick of it. She and Alah and Bobo had recently started a nighttime ritual of gathered prayer – just the three of them, praying that peace would hold and God’s grace be with the world.

She had got home last night, tired but happy to catch up with all her parents’ news, especially that of George. She longed to see him.

In return, she had told her mother about a day out on the royal yacht. She had accompanied the girls with the King and Queen on a short voyage to Dartmouth Naval College, and there they had met a delightful boy, who showed off to the Princesses by leaping over tennis court nets. He was a Greek prince called Philip. The Princesses, especially Lilibet, who was now thirteen, had seemed rather taken by him.

Someone knocked lightly on Marion’s door. ‘Come in, Dad.’

He poked his head round. ‘How did you know it was me?’

‘Because Mother would have made more noise.’

They both laughed.

‘I’ve brought you tea,’ he said, putting the cup and saucer on the table by her alarm clock, then sitting on the edge of her bed. ‘She’s on the phone to someone from church.’