Unwanted & lonely, yes. But Margaret was never pompous

THE received wisdom, among those who did not know Princess Margaret, is that she must have been a nightmare, one minute the life and soul of the party, the next a haughty grande dame, and that she stayed up all hours, selfishly ignoring the yawns of those who would have to rise betimes.

Probably there was a bit of truth in this but, as one of our friends remarked when reading a posthumous hatchet job: ‘That’s not the Princess we knew.’

I had met her through my first wife [author and Oxford English professor] Katherine Duncan-Jones, who was best pals with a charming Byzantine historian named James Howard-Johnston. He had married the novelist Angela Huth, a friend of Princess Margaret.

Once a term the Princess would come to stay with the Howard-Johnstons in their house in Headington, Oxford, for two or three days, and they would round up dons, writers and similar to come to dinner. The

Princess fitted in with remarkable ease and without pomposity.

A few years after my wife and I parted company, she rang Katherine and said, ‘We missed you at dinner

last night.’ Katherine had simply forgotten the date.

The Princess didn’t appear to feel slighted. She merely remarked that she was looking forward to seeing Katherine’s new house, adding: ‘Can I come and see it?’

‘Of course,’ said Katherine, not realising that this meant ‘can I come to see it now?’

Half an hour later, Princess Margaret turned up outside the small terraced house in Jericho [Oxford]. She and Katherine then spent two hours drinking tea and catching up on gossip.

The sad thing about the Princess at this stage of her life was that she was intensely lonely. Elizabeth Cavendish, her lady-in-waiting, told me she dreaded being rung up by her on Sunday evenings.

Elizabeth’s companion, John Betjeman, would beg her not to answer the telephone, since inevitably, rather than settling down to a nice slump on the sofa and watching drivel on television, they would have to make scrambled eggs for their ‘little friend’, as he called her.

Then, rather than having an early night after the Ten O’Clock News, they would have to sit up as long as the little friend needed them, swigging Famous Grouse, with the certainty of a hangover the next day.

Turning up with barely any notice to see Katherine was typical. And of course, poor thing, the Princess was not really wanted — not because her friends and acquaintances disliked her but because she was royal. And when a royal person arrives at your perfectly ordinary house, where no staff are employed, an unnatural degree of effort is required.

Nevertheless, Princess Margaret gets full marks for goodhumouredly trying to fit into the weird world of Oxford. She read

the books we had written and commented on them.

Once, I asked for her view of the ordination of women to the priesthood — this was aeons before it happened. She said that the Queen approved of the idea.

Another time, I asked if she ever had dreams about the Queen (as I often do, for some reason).

She did, and it was always the same one. She had done something wrong and did not know, or remember, what it was. She only knew she was out of favour with her sister.

‘When I wake in the morning after this dream, I have to ring her up. She is usually at work when I ring, so all I need to do is to hear her voice. “Hello.” And I say,

“Hello” and hang up. Then all’s right with the world again.’