My Memories of Princess Margaret
Princess Margaret famously accessorised a cocktail in one hand with a cigarette in the other. But the fun-loving royal, who struggled to find purpose in the shadow of her sister Queen Elizabeth, proved she could rein in her vices when she had to give up smoking and drinking in her later years.
“I asked her, ‘Is it very hard?’” recalls her lady-in-waiting of three decades, Anne Glenconner. “She said, ‘No, Anne, once I make up my mind to do something, I do it’.’’ That was certainly the way she lived. In Lady in Waiting: My Extraordinary Life in the Shadow of the Crown, Glenconner, 87, opens a window into the royal world as it intertwined with her own.
“Oh gosh, what have we done?”
Glenconner grew up in an aristocratic family; had a rocky marriage to fellow aristocrat Colin Tennant (who later became Lord Glenconner); and lost two of their five children (Henry died of an AIDS-related illness in 1990; Charles died of hepatitis C in
