Mrs Queen Takes the Train by William Kuhn

Author:William Kuhn
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2012-09-30T14:00:00+00:00

[© The Trustees of the National Library of Scotland]

Luke said nothing.

“Of course that was the war where they first discovered that the real trauma might come after the war was over. Psychological. Do you know? They tried to treat it with electric shocks?” She breathed for a moment indignantly. “Didn’t work. But then that man Rivers had some success treating Siegfried Sassoon with a talking therapy. At a hospital somewhere up here, as a matter of fact. Near Edinburgh, I believe.”

Luke sighed and pulled on her arm gently to show that it was time they started moving along. Anne followed Luke’s lead, but carried on: “Sassoon would have taken an interest in those boys, of course. He wrote quite a good book about it. The war, the men friends, the uneasiness. Anyone can read it and understand. I did. Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, and then the whole Sherston trilogy.”

Again, Luke said nothing, but he made a mental note to look for the book, just as she’d intended him to.

Shirley had a secret addiction to cheese. She found that it calmed her down. She had secret stashes in The Queen’s clothes closets: wedges of aged Stilton so old that it didn’t hurt them to be kept wrapped in clingfilm at room temperature, and foil-wrapped portions of cream cheese with a laughing cow on the label. When the anger that kept her going got to be a little too much for her, she’d steal away to the cupboards and nibble something from her supplies. She’d heard her contemporaries complain about their doctors’ orders. “Oh, I’ve got the cholesterol, darling. ‘No more cheese,’ he said. High blood pressure too. No more salt. Said I’ve got to use the hot sauce instead.” Shirley solved this problem by not going to the doctors. She received regular notices from the National Health Service in Windsor Castle that she was due for a checkup, but she ignored them. The Castle had a large enough population to have its own NHS medical unit, and the waiting time was much less than outside the Castle walls. Still Shirley refused to go.

The Queen gave her little natural remedies in tiny green bottles. Both The Queen and her mother were great believers in homeopathy. When once Shirley complained of lacking energy, The Queen had said, “I have just the thing for it.” She unlatched the powerful snap on her boxy handbag and brought out a little vial of lavender oil. “Wonderful for tiredness. I take it. It works.” Shirley accepted the bottle and tried the lavender oil. She wasn’t sure, but she thought it helped a little.

She and William one night in Buckingham Palace, when The Queen was out late and they had to stay up to welcome her back and put her to bed, sat in a room with The Queen’s shoe cupboards. They watched an old American Western on television. At one point John Wayne had said with contempt of a gun-toting opponent, “Why, he’s nuthin but a snake-oil salesman.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.