The Royal Nanny by Karen Harper
“But how?” Johnnie asked as if he grasped every word of what was being said—and, since he’d come up with “ep-lep-sies,” perhaps he did.
“I worked very hard to build myself up. Took walks and runs and swims.”
“Righto. I do that, but the swims only in the tub. I wanted to swim in the sea when we were with the royal Russians, but Lala said no.”
“Ah, got to keep an eye on those Russians, and I’m glad to hear your Lala keeps a good eye on you.”
When we finally stood up to leave—I realized I’d been gripping my hands together so hard in my lap that my fingers had gone numb—Mr. Roosevelt asked me, “Is he being schooled at home, ma’am? I was in the beginning when I wasn’t well.”
“Yes. They are all with tutors for a while, then out into the world, but I teach him things too—his handwriting.”
“My lad, I can tell you are a square, bully boy!” he said and ruffled Johnnie’s hair. And then, to my great amazement, he extended his hand to me for what must be a very American handshake. His hand was huge and warm.
“I can’t thank you enough,” I told him. “We shall not forget you, right, Johnnie? Thank your new friend.”
“Righto. I won’t forget you and I will write you a letter when I learn how.”
“I will look for that letter. You just have it sent through one of your father—the king’s—equerries or secretaries, eh?” he said with a look at me.
I took Johnnie’s hand, and we went out. “He was very nice, just like Grandpapa was,” he said, looking up so earnestly at me. “So if I’m not king someday, president would be fine too.”
Chapter 28
In his new reign, poor King George had trouble from all sides, including from his mother. She didn’t want to give up her “sweet, little crown,” Sandringham House, or Buckingham Palace. He had problems with Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, who tried to restrict the power of the House of Lords. The Suffragettes took their motto “Deeds, not words!” to the streets in protests and vandalism and went on hunger strikes. That strike was matched by workers’ unions and protests: a railway strike, a cotton industry strike. The coalfield strikers in South Wales and other places refused to work too. As ever, the Irish were demanding home rule, and I know that worried him.
Though the king had always been a short-tempered man, he was even more so now, and I lived in fear that something Johnnie did might get him sent away. I dreaded what Mr. Hansell’s judgment of the lad would be when he began to tutor him. Hansell was a toe-the-line sort who wanted yes-or-no, down-the-line answers, and that was not Johnnie. If Hansell compared Johnnie to clever George, Johnnie was such . . . well, such a dreamer, creative too, in his own way—but definitely not down the line.
Ordinarily, I would not have been so strict with the dear boy, but I was afraid that his love of the king’s beloved pet parrot would cause a problem too.
King George, so unlike himself, now gave that squawky, colorful macaw free rein in York Cottage, where we yet lived so the Queen Mother, Alexandra, could have the Big House. But even when the king took the bird there, she flew hither and yon, landing on ornate flower and fruit centerpieces or even people’s plates—fortunately, usually the king’s. Johnnie had picked up on a piece of doggerel that George had composed, and chanted it all the time, no matter who was near: “Charlotte the parrot / Rules in the palace,” over and over.
“Lala,” the king said to me one day when I was chasing Johnnie who was chasing Charlotte down the front staircase, “if the boy can learn that little poem, can’t he learn simple sums? Hansell says he thinks it’s hopeless. I don’t need outsiders in these dreadful times thinking my son believes a birdbrain and not a king rules in the palace.”
“Yes, Your Majesty. I will see to it that he doesn’t chase the bird and say that—if I can.”
“Ah, Mrs. Lala, I do remember your first name is Charlotte, so perhaps I unwittingly named that grit-and-go parrot after you. It sometimes does as I want but usually goes its own way.”
Grabbing Johnnie’s wrist, I came down the last two stairs so that I didn’t tower above the king. “I do what is best for your son, as you have bid me, sir.”
He sighed. “I know you do, but tough times are ahead with many enemies. Best he not come to London to wave us off for the tour of India, best he stay here where he’s safer. Charlotte the parrot’s not going on our trip either, my boy,” he added, stooping slightly. “Charlotte’s staying in London.”
“Not this Charlotte Lala,” he said. “She stays with me.”
“Yes, of course,” he agreed, but I didn’t like the trend of all this. A parrot could go to London but not his own son? Worse, the king was shrinking Johnnie’s world when I longed to expand it, to teach him things—oh, not sums—but about the world, birds and flowers and . . . and life. As my father used to say, I felt caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.
I WALKED A tightrope after that, with events blurring by in my efforts to help and amuse Johnnie and keep him safe from being sent into exile as his father had done with his other sons. In the early summer of 1912, when Johnnie was seven, his brother George was sent away to school at St. Peter’s Court for summer term. That was about the time David got the mumps and wrote me a sad letter from Dartmouth about how lonely he still felt and how he wasn’t ready to go for a two-year stay at Oxford, though he would take Finch with him.
But the David I saw the next year in May, while the king and queen were at a wedding on the continent, with Kaiser Wilhelm and Tsar Nicholas in attendance, wasn’t sad at all. He drove into Sandringham, Finch by his side, honking his horn, roaring along in his new gray Daimler.
I was proud that the king had invested David as Prince of Wales on his seventeenth birthday last year, but it had gone to his head. The I serve motto of the heir was more like I must be served under David, though he dare not act that way before his parents. He’d taken to ordering even his brothers and sister around, although Mary mostly ignored him.
“Isn’t it a beauty, Lala?” David shouted to me. “Get in and we’ll take a ride. But it might be too dangerous for Johnnie. Finch can stay with him.”
“David, he’d love to go if it’s safe.”
“Safe? Of course it’s safe, but he and Finch will have a fine time here. Lala, the Prince of Wales is speaking,” David declared as Finch climbed out and held the door for me. I hesitated. I couldn’t bear to look at Johnnie, and I was angry with David, but I had promised him.
“Can we go round once and then collect Johnnie and Finch?” I asked.
“All right then.”
Finch picked Johnnie up, something I could not do anymore. “We’ll be right back, Johnnie. Right back,” I called to my boy.
But we weren’t. We sped through the village, where I saw Penny playing with some other children. We roared down to the train station and back, but whizzed right past York Cottage where Finch and Johnnie were throwing stones in the lake.
“David, you said you’d stop for them,” I protested, however much I admired his motorcar and driving skills.
“And we will. I may even take Grannie for a ride. She’s becoming too much of a recluse, I hear. Poor Aunt Toria has to wait on her hand and foot, and Grannie won’t let any suitors near her.”
“We visit her sometimes. Yes, her mind wanders a bit.”
“Then I’ll bet she and Johnnie get on famously.”
“Take me back right now. It’s been a lovely ride, but I need to go back to the cottage.”
He smiled and shrugged, but obeyed me, though he did not have to anymore. We pulled up in front in a cloud of dust, but I saw only Finch. My heart leaped out of my chest faster than I leaped out of the motorcar.
“Finch, where’s Johnnie?”
“We’re playing hide-and-seek. He’s just back round the side of the house. He’s not near the lake.”
“I didn’t see him. I hope he didn’t take one of those bicycles. He’s a good rider now. We— I taught him.”
I looked up to see Johnnie on the slanted second-story roof above our heads, peering over, waving down. That dratted David was still laying on his horn.
“Johnnie!” I cried above that noise. “Don’t you lean over! Don’t you move! Finch is coming up to get you.”
“Not Finch,” he said. “Not David. Only Lala. You took a fast ride but the birds are flying up here. I think I can see Chad’s house too. It would be so fun to fly.”
Dear Lord, I feared he would fall or even jump—try to fly. Pushing Finch aside, who acted like he was going up anyway, I picked up my skirts hems to my knees and started to climb.
I talked as I went up, holding to each rung of the ladder, holding to hope that Johnnie would not jump. “You sit down!” I told him, despite the fact he often did not obey. “You stay right there!”
“But Lala,” he said, leaning over the eaves, “Georgie told me men can fly now. He showed me pictures. He reads me books.”
“They cannot fly unless they have wings, and you do not. Sit down!”
I’d been so proud of George’s early reading skills, just as I’d grieved Johnnie’s lack, but I’d never imagined this. I’d hated heights ever since we got locked in that Scottish tower. I was so high now that I could look across the upward slant of roof, but I was only at the height of the boy’s feet.
“Sit down,” I ordered again. “Sit down right there. I want to talk to you.”
At last, he obeyed. Finally David laid off sounding his motorcar horn. Evidently, he had not even climbed out of the Daimler to help. I was angry with him, with Johnnie, with George, with the king—with the world. At least Finch had the brains to just steady the ladder beneath me. Well, he’d better, after letting the boy out of his sight.
As if nothing was amiss, Johnnie chattered on. “Do you know stories about men flying, Lala? You don’t read me those. The War in the Air, that was one book. Airships in the sky. Georgie said so, and I want to see one.”
“All right, all right. But we have open fields here to see the sky. It’s more important to have open space on the ground than to sit on a roof. Scoot closer to me—slowly—and we’ll go down the ladder, then watch the sky from the lawn. We’ll ask your grannie to let us go up to the top floor of the Big House and look out the windows. We’ll be higher than this then. Come on, Johnnie.”
“And don’t be mad at Georgie.”
“I won’t. Not much.”
“If Papa sends him away to school, you can read those books to me.”
“All right now, I have a hold of you. Turn over on your tummy and scoot this way so I can put your feet on the ladder and we’ll go down together.”
He did as I bid but kept talking. “You do believe it, don’t you, Lala? Men fly in aircraft and shoot at each other in the sky.”
“In books, Johnnie. Just in books. And in our minds. We don’t want war in the air any more than on the land or sea.”
“Papa said to Mama there might be war if Cousin Willie builds up his arms. But I heard he has one really small arm, and he hides it.”
I must keep him talking, but I wanted to scream—and get back on solid ground. Ah, I had him now, on the ladder, his back pressed against me, his feet on the rung at my waist level.
“I’m going down one step at a time, then I’ll bring you with me,” I told him. “But you keep hanging on with your hands all the way down.”
“That’s what else Papa said about bad war—we have to hang on.”
“I KNOW WHAT you’re going to say,” George told me when he came into the empty drawing room after supper that evening. Jane was watching Johnnie upstairs, who was still going on about flying, and I had asked for George.
“Then tell me what I’m going to say, George. If you knew already, why didn’t you think ahead when you filled your little brother’s head with ideas of men flying and shooting, no less?”
“But that’s just it, Lala.” He looked so in earnest, standing as if at attention before me. “I am thinking ahead and not about the navy where Papa is determined to send me. I want to learn to fly an aeroplane. I’ve read and read about it in H. G. Wells’s The War in the Air and The Sleeper Awakes and Jules Verne’s Master of the World.”
“Yes, well, I am proud of your reading and your intelligence and imagination, but as for those shooting battles in the sky, please don’t involve Johnnie. Thank you for reading to him, but you do know he can’t always tell the difference between truth and pretend, don’t you? You have him looking up at the sky all the time, and he bumps into things. He nearly fell in the lake yesterday, let alone he could have fallen off the roof.”
“Yes, but you watch him well, and Finch didn’t.”
“The way you present your case, perhaps you should be a barrister someday, George Edward Alexander Edmund—when you are not fighting the enemy in aeroplanes.”
“It’s not all in books and imagination, Lala, really! In the 1890s, both Germany and the United States patented rigid flying machines called Zeppelins. And guess what? They are filled with gas that makes them float, but it can burn too if they are not careful. A little hard to steer in the wind, but there’s a cabin at the bottom with a crew. How I’d love to fly in one. Wouldn’t you?”
“I admit that would be quite something, but I prefer to keep my feet on the ground—and Johnnie’s too.”
“Don’t be angry, Lala. I know you are at David but not at Bertie or Harry—never Mary or especially Johnnie. So don’t be angry with me, please. Should I not read to him then? He can’t just listen to that gramophone music all day. I thought I was helping him—and you by amusing and tending him at times.”
Ah, my clever and brilliant George. I had meant to scold him but I hugged and thanked him instead. But what nonsense—what pie in the sky indeed—about war, especially in God’s beautiful heavens.
Part Five
1914–1919
York Cottage to Wood Farm
Chapter 29
I was so tragically wrong about aeroplanes and men shooting at each other. All too soon, England and all of Europe swept toward war. It wasn’t King George and Queen Mary’s triumphant Entente Cordiale visit to France to strengthen ties that made the kaiser, “Cousin Willie,” angry. It wasn’t even that the so-called Autocrat of All the Russias, “Cousin Nicky,” mobilized a huge army. It was the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and his commoner wife Sophie, a couple who had once visited Their Majesties in England, in little Serbia that set off the powder keg. Austria then declared war on Serbia, and everyone else took sides.
King George had written a personal appeal to Kaiser Wilhelm, but Germany still declared war on Russia and then on France, so England as a French ally was all in. Ultimatums and tense replies flew back and forth. Talk about family squabbles: Since so many of Queen Victoria’s descendants ruled Europe, family fought family.
I heard about all this—sometimes, when the king and queen made time for brief visits to Sandringham, but I could never quite understand it. Why? Why war? And why was everyone acting, this August 1914, the month Germany declared war on England, as if that was a reason for celebration?
When Johnnie and I got to the village green to hear the small brass band, Chad appeared from the crowd, ruffled Johnnie’s hair, then twirled me off my feet while Johnnie clapped and laughed. Chad put me down and kissed my cheek. He was beaming as Penny, newly turned nine just like Johnnie, ran to us and was swept up in Chad’s arms. She had a little Union Jack flag that she sweetly gave to Johnnie as she beamed at me. Clusters of cheering local folk seemed to bubble up around us, and I’d seldom seen Chad so jubilant.
“The local lads and men are enlisting in the King’s Own Sandringham Company,” he told us. “I have too, along with Winnie’s husband, Fred, and many neighbors. We’ll be in the Fifth Battalion of
“If he hurts peeps, he’s a very bad man,” Johnnie agreed.
“Stealing them to sell as well as to get back at you for tracking him, the beastly wretch,” I said. “It’s gone on for years, like a deadly game with him. Perhaps he will finally step forth to enlist, where he’ll have to give his name and address, and you can find him and have him arrested.”
“Not that sneaking coward, but he does know I’m after him.” Yet, for once, Chad barely frowned over the wretch who had been the bane of his life these last few years. “But let’s talk about better things,” he insisted. “See that poster over there?” he asked and pointed at a large chestnut tree with a stiff piece of paper nailed to it. From the poster, a mustached man in a billed and decorated military cap pointed a finger straight at us. The big printed words read, BRITONS. JOIN YOUR COUNTRY’S ARMY! GOD SAVE THE KING!
“Who’s that man?” Johnnie asked Chad. “His nanny should tell him it’s not polite to point.”
Chad hooted a laugh. “Then he didn’t have a nanny as good as yours. That’s Lord Kitchener, lad, your papa’s secretary of war.”
“But,” I put in, “it means you’ll be leaving, Chad. Going into war . . . into danger.”
“With our powerful navy and fighting force, it will be over by Christmas. Everyone says so,” he assured me and gave Penny a bounce in his arms before he put her down.