Tomorrow is another day, and I shall not allow this awful ennui to continue. There are people who have it far worse than me.

Chapter Forty-Three

Windsor Castle, July 1944

‘Come in, come in.’ Tommy opened his office door to Crawfie. ‘Sit down. I am having to make the tea myself this afternoon. P-T is doing her fire watch duty.’

‘I did mine two nights ago. Jolly cold up on the roof. I hope P-T has a good coat.’

‘She’s a woman of good country stock,’ Tommy answered, filling the small electric kettle from a large water jug. ‘If I know her, she’ll be as warm as toast.’ He plugged the kettle in. ‘Sugar? Milk?’

‘No, thank you. Just black. Before this war, I used to have three teaspoons of sugar, but rationing has killed my sweet tooth.’

‘I wish it had mine.’ Tommy set up a tray with two saucers, two cups and a teapot into which he deployed a good amount of loose tea. ‘I couldn’t cook before the war – now look at me. Rustling up a cuppa at the drop of a hat.’

Marion smiled. During these war years, Tommy and she had become friends – not too close, but with an understanding of each other.

It had started in the dungeons on the long dark nights of air raids; Tommy noticed that she never showed any nerves or fear, always comforting the Princesses, and the first to make a hot drink for anyone who couldn’t sleep. When the Princesses fell asleep, cosy in their blankets, Crawfie would bring a book out of her bag and read.

During one particularly close bombing raid, when the ancient foundations of the castle seemed to shake beneath them, Crawfie had showed no concern. She checked that the noise hadn’t disturbed the girls, or Alah and Bobo, then serenely returned to her book. Her fortitude impressed Tommy, and in the next raid, he found himself sitting opposite her in one of the wider stone tunnels.

She was reading P.G. Wodehouse’s The Code of the Woosters and it was clearly amusing her.

‘That looks like the perfect antidote to an air raid,’ he said softly, so as not to awake those around him.

‘Wodehouse?’ replied Crawfie. ‘He really is a good writer. It was the girls who started me on him. The Queen orders the books. Have you read any?’

‘Oh, rather. Carry On, Jeeves kept me company when I was in India. Have you read Forster’s A Passage to India?’

‘No.’

‘Well, you should.’

And so their shared interest had begun.

Now she spotted her copy of Osbert Sitwell’s A Place of One’s Own on Tommy’s desk.

‘How are you getting on with it?’ she asked.

‘Not bad but rather too fanciful for me. Would an elderly couple choose to buy a wreck of a house rumoured to be haunted?’

‘I rather enjoy being scared.’ Crawfie smiled. ‘I began reading it aloud to Bobo and Alah around the nursery fire on evenings we aren’t parcelled into the dungeons, but Alah had to tell me to stop because it was scaring Bobo too much.’ Crawfie laughed. ‘Yet she is never frightened of the real haunted dungeons we sleep in.’