What was The Queen like as a teenager? Inside the wartime diary of her childhood confidante

No one could have suspected at the time that the daily scribblings of an aristocratic young girl, who spent the war years hanging out with Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret at Windsor, would survive to be the stuff of history. Except perhaps the teenage author herself. Alathea Fitzalan Howard wrote her way out of an unhappy girlhood and then kept up the practice all her life, secretly hoping that one day her journals would be published as ‘a portrait of an age no longer existing’. What she didn’t realise was that her charmed place in the day-to-day life of the Royal family during the Second World War made her a unique witness to the shaping of the future Queen.

The Windsor Diaries (1940-45), published next week, has been distilled by her niece Lady Isabella Naylor-Leyland from 64 volumes, beginning in January 1940, on the eve of Alathea moving to Windsor when she was 16, and ending a few weeks before her death in 2001 at the age of 77. ‘Not one day unrecorded in all that time!’ she writes.

When the diaries begin, the Royal family has moved from London to Royal Lodge, Windsor Great Park, for greater safety during the Second World War, and Alathea is also living in the park. Her parents have split up – her socialite mother Joyce (later Countess Fitzwilliam) has little interest in children, and her father, Viscount Fitzalan of Derwent, a First World War veteran, is ill-equipped to deal with a teenager – so Alathea is living miserably in the confines of Cumberland Lodge with her crusty grandfather Lord Fitzalan and maiden aunt Magdalen, whom she refers to as ‘the tigress’. The two families already knew each other – Cumberland Lodge had been loaned to Lord Fitzalan, the last Viceroy of Ireland, for his lifetime as a grace-andfavour house by King George V in 1924.

Alathea’s account of life in royal lockdown is like having a clear spyhole through frosted glass. It’s candid, affectionate and sharply observant, pulsing with teenage angst and romantic longing. Alathea is thrilled to traipse down miles of icy corridors to a sleepover in the Royal family’s air-raid shelter under Windsor Castle, and when Queen Elizabeth (later known as the Queen Mother) comes into her room to say goodnight, she is beside herself with joy.

A leitmotif of the diaries is her yearning for a warm, loving parent, like Queen Elizabeth, who is such a contrast to her own stylish, amusing, but rather brittle mother. ‘She showed Alathea real kindness,’ says Isabella. ‘I shall always feel grateful for that. I know, as a mother, that Queen Elizabeth would have been the one to say: “Why don’t we have Alathea over?” Or, “Alathea, that colour does suit you.” It meant the world to her.’

There is a tentative moment when Princess Elizabeth, then only 14, shows Alathea a press cutting of Prince Philip of Greece and confides that he is her ‘boy’. Alathea, who admits to her diary that Philip is not her type, treats the confidence as absolutely unbreakable. ‘When she hears other people talking about it,’ says Isabella, ‘she thinks, “I won’t let on that I know.” That’s very charming.’

Lying on their beds, Alathea and Princess Elizabeth – ‘Lilibet’, as she is known – gossip about the young men who are likely to be at a forthcoming ball or party and talk about their marriage hopes. Princess Elizabeth wonders if she will marry at all. ‘I assured her she would,’ writes Alathea on 7 June 1941. ‘And she said if she really wanted to marry someone she’d run away, but I know she wouldn’t really – her sense of duty’s too strong.’ Alathea, who is obsessed with the 18th century and fancies she was Marie Antoinette in a former life, believes she herself is ‘destined to know great love’.

From her accounts of shared cooking lessons, we learn that ‘Lilibet actually likes washing up and does more of it than the rest of us put together.’ They go to Girl Guides together, have dance lessons, play charades and meet up for outdoor art classes.

Compared with her sparkling, high-spirited sister Princess Margaret, Lilibet is ‘very matter-of-fact and uncurious and above all untemperamental’. To Alathea, two and a half years older, her best friend’s interests seem childish – drawing horses and dogs – ‘yet she’s far more serious and sensible than me’. To overcome her difficulty making conversation with strangers, Alathea writes that Princess Elizabeth would take her dogs along with her as a talking point. ‘She insisted on bringing the dogs because she said they were the greatest save to the conversation when it dropped,’ writes Alathea in March 1941. She sometimes finds Lilibet’s placid nature exasperating, but is perceptive enough to see that her friend’s innate decorum is fitting, considering her destiny.

Although Alathea admires the Princess’s ‘dignified grace’, she offers a few home truths about her looks in her diary. On Good Friday 1942, when Princess Elizabeth is almost 16, Alathea writes: ‘Lilibet is at the bad age now – rather fat and her face puffy at the jaw and a bit stolid... But in a year’s time when she makes up she will improve infinitely.’ She repeats a friend’s observation that the Princess has ‘an enormous chest’ and adds: ‘It’s a great pity as it’ll be awful one day.’ When the Princess turns up to swimming in a new bathing costume that is yet again a plain black one, Alathea despairs: ‘Why on earth doesn’t she get a nice one?’

Alathea is also waspish about the fashion choices of Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, four years her junior, disapproving of the fact that they dress in identical clothes and wear only a limited wardrobe (Aertex shirts and drab skirts). ‘They always look frightfully ordinary,’ she notes in October 1941.

‘It was the Queen Mother’s war effort,’ explains Isabella. ‘She didn’t want them to have new outfits. The Royal family were very much trying to do their bit. I’ve always been told there was a line in the baths and you only ran your water to that line to save water.

‘What I particularly love is that they do all the very simple things, some of which I’ve done with my children, such as collect bits of old stone and china from the river.’ When the princesses and Alathea hear that a German plane has been shot down in the forest, they race off to have a look at the wreckage and collect bits of it as souvenirs.

However Alathea finds some of the princesses’ activities and enthusiasms puzzling. ‘They take the dogs down to the tennis court and get them to jump over the net,’ Isabella says. ‘[Alathea] cannot think why this amuses them. They scream with laughter, but she finds it very dull. She is also quite disparaging about their taste in “silly films” [the Marx Brothers and Sailors Three], but has to pretend to find them funny. In her own way, she had these sophisticated ideas, whereas they didn’t. They were really happy with their very charming pastimes. I love that side of [the diaries].

Though a warm and loyal friend to the princesses, Alathea secretly disapproves of Princess Elizabeth acting with local schoolchildren in Christmas pantomimes, such as Aladdin and Sleeping Beauty. ‘The princesses ought not to touch the schoolchildren,’ she observes primly, when the lead part requires her to pat a child on the back. She also finds it unseemly that the Princess is crawling under cars as part of her Auxiliary Territorial Service course in mechanics.

Isabella admits she has edited out some of Alathea’s more politically incorrect comments. ‘After all, we are talking about children,’ she reasons. ‘In a quandary, I’d imagine what she would say if she were sitting beside me. I often felt it would be: “Oh gosh, leave it in. After all, it’s what was said.” I nevertheless felt there were some conversations she had with the Queen [they continued to meet once or twice a year throughout Alathea’s life] that it would be damaging to both sides of the friendship to include.

‘My main objective throughout the whole project has been to honour Alathea’s wish without upsetting anyone. That is the last thing Alathea would have wanted.’ No official approval was sought, but Isabella sent excerpts from the diary to the Queen’s ladyin-waiting as a courtesy. The Palace has approved all the photographs in the book.

Today Alathea’s diaries – mostly Smythson leather-bound notebooks, with handwriting cramming every page to the edges – occupy a long shelf in the library at Milton Hall, an Elizabethan and Palladian house in Cambridgeshire, set in 35 acres of grounds. Isabella’s husband, Sir Philip Naylor-Leyland, 4th Baronet, inherited the estate on the death of his mother Elizabeth Anne, Alathea’s much-loved younger sister, who died in 1997, aged 63.

Isabella met her husband when she was 17. They have lived at Milton Hall since 1999, but also run a second family seat, the 17thcentury Nantclwyd Hall in north Wales, which Philip inherited on his father’s death in 1987. They have six grown-up children, and five grandchildren. Their eldest, Tom, has revived the family estate in Malton, North Yorkshire, promoting the market town as Yorkshire’s food capital. His wife, Alice, is a social-media influencer with a successful business selling ‘tablescapes’.

‘I had no idea [Alathea] was going to leave me the diaries,’ admits Isabella, daughter of the 6th Earl of Durham, a natural beauty at 62. She is wearing espadrilles, a boho shirt and a midi-skirt glinting with tiny mirrors. ‘The only inkling I had was once when I found her writing in what looked like a journal. When I asked her what she was doing, she replied: “You know perfectly well – and you’ll just have to wait!” I thought that meant I might get to see them one day. When her will was read out, I was so touched. They were her most precious possession.’

It took Isabella two years to read and annotate the diaries – some 4.5 million words in all. They were a revelation. She had no idea that the composed, circumspect and rather quaint woman she first met when she was 17 had known such sadness – or that the ‘imaginative kindness’ of the Royal family, particularly the then Queen, had been Alathea’s saving. ‘How I love and depend on them!’ Alathea wrote.

Her mother took a dim view of Alathea’s closeness to the Royal family, believing that so much time spent with younger girls was spoiling her chances of making a good match. She would have preferred her to be with girls of her own age, preferably at a finishing school.

In between girlish accounts of tea parties with Grenadier officers and jolly punting on the river with the princesses, it comes as a shock to read that Alathea was regularly selfharming. She was lonely, stifled by the oppressive regime of her elderly relations and desperate for the warmth of a loving, united family. Her younger sister was being brought up at Houghton Hall in North Yorkshire with their mother and the two girls met only a few times a year. ‘I am a lonely stranger in my family,’ she wrote in 1941. ‘I haven’t got a home.’

After a row with her grandfather, Alathea describes cutting herself with a penknife. When Princess Elizabeth notices the marks on her arm, she says the cat scratched her. What would her friend think, she wonders, if she really knew. On another occasion she uses a needle to score her skin and draw blood. ‘It relieved my feelings but still I could find no outlet for my pent-up angry soul.

‘The first time I read it,’ says Isabella, ‘I absolutely dissolved. I was horrified and terribly upset. As we now know, it is a recognised psychological condition, but all she knows is that it gives her a huge sense of relief and she has no idea why. They would never leave her alone. She just wanted some understanding. Her one great comfort was her friendship with the princesses.’

‘I am fonder of them,’ Alathea wrote, ‘than of my own family, but I know that they are happier alone with their parents than with anyone else on earth.’

Unable to comprehend the apparent lack of parental love in her own life, Alathea once told Isabella spiritedly: ‘My dear, if I’d come from a different background I’d have been taken into care!’

‘She was such a brave person,’ says Isabella. ‘I now know how brave she was. She was not the young, unhappy, snooty girl of the diaries. She was surviving; she was just getting by.’

Alathea’s greatest ambition, other than to marry the heir to a great estate, was to become Princess Elizabeth’s lady-in-waiting and she was deeply hurt to be passed over when the Princess turned 18. Isabella suspects that Alathea was not practical enough. ‘She was suited in so many ways, especially in her devotion to the Royal family and to Princess Elizabeth. At a dinner or an embassy event, you could have sat her next to anyone and she would have been brilliant. But I can’t imagine her whirling round the world and having the right ticket on her.’

Alathea attended the marriage of Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip in 1947, but was not invited to the Coronation of 1953 (‘my star waned a long time ago’). What really jarred, says Isabella, is that her mother was invited as a peer’s wife – and Alathea was there while she was ‘faffing around’ getting ready in her finery.

After the excitement and intimacies of war, Alathea was bereft in London. All her friends were getting married, yet she went months without a date. In 1953, despite her teenage declaration that she would never seriously consider a second son, she married the divorced Edward Ward, younger brother of the Earl of Dudley, in a register office. In Philip Naylor-Leyland’s dressing room there is a beautiful portrait of his aunt at this time, painted by Leonard Boden. Dressed in an evening gown and jewels, she looks regal, self-assured, almost pretty.

‘She wasn’t a beauty,’ says Isabella. ‘But she was so soignée and elegant and had such a way of carrying herself. The Alathea I met was, despite everything, standing so tall. She seemed to me very confident and, having read the diaries, I like to think this was because she had overcome so much. I came to adore her.’

The Wards’ marriage was unhappy. ‘I’m afraid that Eddie seems to have gone off Alathea physically almost as soon as the marriage starts which, typically, he blames on her,’ says Isabella.

Their travels abroad were fraught with Pooterish mishaps and her culinary skills were limited. Alathea did not realise that meat from the freezer had to be thawed before cooking and could not understand why her joints were hard in the middle when everyone else served ‘soft’ meat. Alathea wrote in her diary: ‘Eddie gets crosser and thinner by the day.’

‘By the time I met her they had reached a sort of plateau,’ says Isabella. ‘She was finally at peace with herself. It is a rather awful thing to say, but I think she had the best part of her life after her husband died [in 1987].’

Alathea became a good linguist, speaking French, German, Russian and Spanish, and travelled widely. The Queen kept up their friendship for the rest of her life, even though Alathea lived in Lausanne. ‘Alathea was always far too discreet to reveal what passed between them, but gave my family and me a brief outline of the lunch, leaving anything more interesting to the diaries.’ In fact, she never gossiped about the Royal family, past or present, or gave a view when they hit the headlines.

It has passed into family legend that Alathea would usually take a taxi to Buckingham Palace, so that she could safely wear some of her jewellery. Afterwards, being frugal, she would put it into a battered carrier bag and return by Tube. ‘Even so,’ says Isabella, ‘she would have been a conspicuous figure on the Tube because she was always so well dressed.’

Alathea longed to have children but, sadly, none arrived. ‘She once intimated to me that if we had met earlier in her childbearing years – I am the mother of six children – she could never have been my friend. There was still that rawness. It made me very sad. She told me that when she went into children’s shops to buy clothes for her nephews and nieces, she would say to the staff they were for her grandchildren. She added: “I hope you don’t mind.” I told her I was honoured.’

Alathea died at Milton Hall of a brain tumour on 5 March 2001. Her last diary entry, a few weeks before her death, was about her chemotherapy. ‘Progress is slow,’ she wrote. As well as the diaries, she left Isabella an exquisite pale-blue enamel brooch surrounded by diamonds and surmounted by the initials ‘ER’ and a crown. It had been given to her by the Queen at Windsor on her 21st birthday. ‘[Alathea] knew I was not a jewellery person,’ says Isabella. ‘I’m sad to say I sort of let her down in that way.’

And yet in every other respect and especially in the great matter of the diaries, she has done Alathea proud. There will surely be sequels.

The Windsor Diaries, by Alathea Fitzalan Howard, is out on 8 October (Hodder & Stoughton, £25); buy a copy at books.telegraph.co.uk

Secret Diary of the Queen's confidante

Saturday, 20 April 1940

Princess Elizabeth’s fourteenth birthday tomorrow. Changed into my green skirt and striped blouse. Went in car to Windsor Castle. All waited in a corridor until King, Queen and princesses arrived… King and Q both charming. Tea four thirty. No proper birthday cake. After, we saw a film. Our presents have been kept for tomorrow, so I might get a letter! [Alathea gave Princess Elizabeth a writing book.] Everyone looked either awful or not suited to the occasion, except the princesses… [They] had lovely pale blue dresses (cloth skirts and silk tops). M’s was frilly and L’s was plainer… I sat next to Margaret (Rose) at tea. The whole family are really charming.

Saturday, 27 April

I changed for Guides. Lilibet [and] Crawfie [their governess] there. We played in Royal Lodge most of time. Crawfie and the princesses are the one spark of youth and vitality here for me among all these middle-aged people! They are friends now, which they never could have been really but for the war. So, the war has done something for me, which I shall always look upon with gratitude.

Friday, 9 August

[Saw the princesses.] We had an obstacle race all over the house and then a Wall’s ice cream man came up and we all had one, though the princesses hated theirs!

Thursday, 3 April 1941

I biked to drawing and we finished modelling our clay horses. It was the last lesson for this term. Afterwards, we played a French tableau game... They said something about Philip, so I said, ‘Who’s Philip?’ Lilibet said, ‘He’s called Prince Philip of Greece’ and then they both burst out laughing. I asked why, knowing quite well! Margaret said, ‘We can’t tell you,’ but L said, ‘Yes, we can. Can you keep a secret?’ Then she said that P was her ‘boy’... L says she cuts photos out of the paper! I must say she is far more grown-up than I was two years ago… I biked home feeling very happy and also proud at being let into such a great secret, which I shall never betray.

Thursday, 23 October

I biked to the Castle. It was lovely to see them again... They wore their old check skirts and Aertex shirts, which they ought not to do – their clothes have gone down a lot since the war... Lilibet said she’d had her hair permed – it looked v. nice in front but too stiff behind. She told me that Philip, her beau, had been for the weekend and that I must come and see him if he came again! She said he’s very funny, which doesn’t sound my type actually – the only thing that does bore me about the Royal Family is that they all will tell one jokes that they’ve heard on wireless, etc. No one else I know is in the least interested in those sort of silly jokes, but then the K and Q and the princesses are v. simple people.

Extracted from The Windsor Diaries