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Their great crisis, and greater opportunity, came when Bertie's brother David, then King Edward VIII, fulfilled his father's prophecy: "That boy will ruin himself in 12 months after I'm gone." Increasingly self-centered and erratic, David became besotted by the twice-divorced American Wallis Simpson and seemed almost eager to shed the burdens of the throne, which he abdicated after only 11 months in December 1936. Elizabeth disdained Simpson as predatory; Simpson knew Elizabeth had steel as well as charm just from looking at her eyes: "Why, they went right through you." Shortly after the abdication, though it made her Queen Consort, Elizabeth described Simpson as "the lowest of the low" and is thought to have been influential in denying the new Duchess of Windsor the right to be called Her Royal Highness. By 1987, she was more forgiving. "I didn't hate [Simpson]," she said. "I just felt sorry for her by the end."
Bertie never wanted the crown and was even more distressed because he felt the abdication had imperiled it. His early days as King George VI were miserable. But his stolid sense of duty, coupled with Elizabeth's warmth and shrewd sense of the public mood, turned out to be a potent formula, quickly put to the ultimate test of a world war. As Britain stood alone against the Nazis, the King and Queen played a unifying and morale-building role that more than repaired whatever dent Edward VIII had put in the monarchy. Pressed to evacuate the princesses to Canada during the blitz, Elizabeth refused. "The children could not go without me, I could not possibly leave the King, and the King would never go." She practiced shooting with a rifle and revolver in case the Germans tried to seize the royal family. Six bombs hit Buckingham Palace in September 1940, aimed deliberately by a German plane that roared down the Mall. The King saw it coming and pushed his wife to the floor, after which debris started falling around them. She turned the close call into a source of enduring public affection. "I am glad we have been bombed," she said. "It makes me feel I can look the East End in the face."
While the palace mostly abided by food rationing, serving Spam and sugarless cakes on silver plate, the Queen eschewed rationed clothing as she energetically toured factories, slums and blitzed cities. Instead she chose to look like a decorous movie star. She said later: "People stand for hours waiting to see me, even in the rain. They do not want me to look like the mothers in Windsor High Street - that would be unfair." She plunged into the crowds too, the first royal to do the "walkabouts" now commonplace. Harold Nicolson, a former diplomat and famous diarist, recorded her wartime visit to Sheffield. "When the car stops, the Queen nips out into the snow and goes straight into the middle of the crowd and starts talking to them. For a moment or two they just gaze and gape in astonishment. But then they all start talking at once. 'Hi! Your Majesty! Look here!' She has that quality of making everybody feel that they and they alone are being spoken to." It was her finest hour, "the hopeless, wonderfully impractical clothes in pastels and in high heels stepping through the debris, but being very practical," says her biographer Ann Morrow. "People of a certain generation will never forget that."
She would never again have the same kind of central public importance. The country reverted to a less demanding peace, and more importantly, her husband's death from lung cancer in 1952 meant the powers of state and the public's attention swung inevitably to another Queen Elizabeth. The Queen Mother searched for a role. She consulted mediums to reach her dead husband. There was a suggestion she go to Canada or Australia for a few years as Governor General. "Oh no," said the young Queen Elizabeth II. "We could not possibly do without Mummy."
So Mummy moved into Clarence House and began a splendid, energetic, half-century "retirement" as a kind of ambassador and national grandmother rolled into one. A tour of the United States to say thank you for wartime help "was a tremendous success," says royal biographer Hugo Vickers. "Manhattan ground to a happy standstill, people came flocking out to see her." For 25 years she was Chancellor of the University of London, delighting in meeting students, going to their dances, drinking rough red wine with them until the small hours. She is patron of some 350 organizations and in her 90th year still managed 118 official engagements. After watching her tour Morley College in 1958, Harold Nicolson observed: "Really, the woodwork, the pottery, and the drawings with which these Morley students occupy themselves in the evening are horrible objects .... [But] she has the astonishing gift of being sincerely interested in dull people and dull occasions." And in sparkling ones: the late poet laureate Ted Hughes read his work at Clarence House, and distinguished lunch partners still get penetrating questions. Recently she took the arm of an old friend and said: "I want to know everything."
She lives in the highest possible style, with 50 servants from footmen to gardeners, ladies' maids to chauffeurs. She is still acquiring horses, her stable having won 440 races as she pursued a passion that has taken her all over the country and led her to install at home the closed-circuit announcing system used by bookmakers to follow results. She spends every penny of the $970,000 the British government provides annually, and many millions of her own - or her daughter's - besides, on artwork, flowers, her trademark couture and one of the finest tables in London that never skimps on the Hollandaise or the Jersey cream on fresh strawberries. She loves a stiff gin and Dubonnet too - or several. "Gin likes her too," says Morrow. "It hasn't the slightest effect on her." The reigning Queen is more abstemious, which has merited some gentle teasing from her mother. Once the Queen asked for a glass of wine at a Clarence House lunch. "Is that wise?" her mother asked. "You know you have to reign all afternoon!"
Or, in the Queen Mum's case, most of a long lifetime. She likes to remain almost "completely oyster" with the press, understanding, like Garbo, that a certain distance can magnify. She permits us to see her sense of fun and style and kindness, so that is what we see. But it's also, in her case, true: you can't get through a century faking it. She is widely loved because she has always been her true self. And that includes, underneath the flouncy hats, a shrewdness and determination that helped deliver the British monarchy into its next century.