The Queen turns 90 on Thursday — as do these remarkable women. They, like HM, represent a generation whose indomitable spirit saw them through Britain’s darkest hour. India Knight salutes them, and they tell their stories
They are hardy of spirit and stiff of backbone, and they are the last of their indomitable kind. Reading about their lives makes you wonder how we all got so feeble and self-obsessed, so babyish. As the Queen turns 90 on Thursday, so do the extraordinary “ordinary” women below. There’s Joan, who, aged 13, refused to be evacuated. They were bombed three times in the war; the family income stopped overnight when her parents’ newsagents was hit. Joan became a bookkeeper at a fishmonger’s, then the headmistress of a school for the blind and eventually an inspector of schools. She divorced in 1968, without fuss, drama or sense of victimhood: “I just realised I was married to the wrong man.”
There’s Margaret, who was glamorous and didn’t know it at the time, and who tap-danced with her older sister to entertain the troops. She started when she was 14 and travelled up and down the country. She still has the little black book she filled with the names of soldiers who fancied her (“There’s over 60 in it”). She became a ballroom dancer, making better money than most men, but gave it up when she married Taylor, who had beautiful teeth and liked a drink or two. They were married for 45 years.
And Norah, who had to bring a bit of turf to school every day to keep the fire going. She left her native Galway aged 15, out of the blue, because her brother was getting married and needed the house. Norah ended up in England — “There was a lot of bad feeling about the English, and we weren’t taught that much,” she says.
These women are amazing. They belong to a specific generation who stopped being children, either physically or figuratively, with the onset of the Second World War. They cracked on and did what they had to do, without pausing for hand-wringing or self-pity, glad only to be alive (“It was a good time to be alive, if you remained so,” Joan says).
Princess Elizabeth undertook her first solo public engagement on April 12, 1943, just before she turned 17 — a visit to the Grenadier Guards. In 1945, she joined the Women’s Auxiliary Territorial Service and trained as a driver and mechanic. On VE Day, she and Princess Margaret mingled with the crowds — “All of us just swept along on a tide of happiness and relief.” In 1952, George VI died and Elizabeth, by now a married woman but still only 25, became Queen.
What we admire in the Queen, whether we are monarchists or republicans, is what we also admire in the women interviewed here. It is the highly unfashionable notion of unstinting, uncomplaining duty, whether to yourself, to your family or to your country: the art of getting on with it, come what may, without making a ghastly fuss. Our interviewees recognise it in the Queen. What they admire in her is a mirror image of an aspect of themselves. We recognise it too. Call them game old birds, tough old broads, or the Queen of the United Kingdom, they are, in anybody’s book, remarkable women, whose like we will not see again. “The Queen has always kept a straight path, even in troubled times,” Norah says. “There’s not a wrong word you can say about her.”