What do you know about the strange world of the British royal family?

We may enter the realm of royal families through fairy tales. So we take a look at the glittering princesses, the lucky princes and the kings, the wise ones and the wicked ones, who dwell between the lines of these stories, from which we learn many lessons and expressions of life, and their stories penetrate into our conscience like the penetration of the intertwining branches around the palace of the sleeping princess.

The rituals, ceremonies, crowns and thrones associated with the royal institution and the idea of ​​judgment and destiny, which is manifested in surrendering to the curses of witches, gods and golden promises, were entrenched in our minds before we realized their meaning.

However, most of us discover by our maturity that the magical and imaginative side of the lives of members of the royal family is a double-edged sword.

It is true that the red rugs are brushed for them wherever they go, but their fame has been imposed on them from the earliest age, and the dazzling jewels catch the lights of the cameras that catch eyes, so in many cases the palaces turn into golden cages.

Despite this, it is difficult to get rid of the long-standing desire to learn about the life of the royal family, perhaps because the members of this bewildering institution, which seems to belong to previous eras, may remind us of days when we yearn to hear fairy tales, especially after these details of our daily life have been extinguished. Longing after puberty.

However, two new novels proved that fictional literature is still considered a gateway to the knowledge of many aspects of royal life, allowing authors to explore private moments and probe the mysteries of characters that historians and biographers are prohibited from writing about due to royal protocols and rules.

The paradox is that despite the predominant role that members of the royal family play in our childhood, their childhood, by virtue of customs and traditions, turned out to be full of problems and difficulties. This is what the two novels “The Nanny” and “A Pure English Princess” reveal with great ingenuity, especially since the authors, Wendy Holland And Claire McHugh, both of them had an obsession with the royal family from a young age.

Holden loved reading old photos in her grandmother’s book and contemplating the coronation ceremony of King George VI, father of Queen Elizabeth II.

“I knew that crowns and furs had a catchy luster,” says Holden. “But what struck me most about these pictures were the characters, because they looked like they were taken from fairy tales, and since then, I wanted, in my own heart, to turn it into a novel.” This desire was not fulfilled until I came across the wonderful story of Marion Crawford, which was the introduction to my novel. “

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Marion Crawford was an ambitious social worker who looked to educate children in the alleys of Edinburgh, but eventually became the nanny of two princesses, Elizabeth, who goes by the name of Belbitt, and her younger sister, Margaret. She stayed with them for 17 years until she retired in 1948, at which point she made a huge mistake by writing “The Little Princesses” about her experience with the royal family, and its publication cut her relationship with the royal family for life.

Holden describes the facts revealed by Crawford as not offensive by current standards, although they contain surprises that arouse the passion of novelists.

“The story revealed unexpected aspects of our queen’s personality, who were very reserved, as she was suffering from anxiety and was vulnerable and impressionable,” she says.

Before Crawford entered the girls’ lives, they had to keep their clothes clean at all times and were not allowed to go outside specific paths in the park.

Holden says Crawford, giving up her interest in social issues, is determined to take the girls out to the outside world to show them semblance of normality. They took a train with her, did a shopping in Woolworth together and swam in public bathtubs. “

As girls their age craved the luxury of royal life, Princess Elizabeth was stunned by the sight of the escalator at the London Underground station. Holden says that the girl’s astonishment at the move of the stairs reveals the shortcomings of excessive protection for children.

“Royal education may be harmful if it isolates members of the ruling family from people who hate vanity and arrogant behaviors,” Holden says. Crawford felt that Elizabeth and Margaret lead a solitary, formal life marked by a Victorian era unrelated to the modern era. The personal and the practical level, as members of the ruling family. That is why I took them outside the palace to show them the daily lives of people, and stimulated within them a sense of humor, creativity and adventure. “

Holden believes that thanks to Crawford, whose name is still synonymous with betrayal in royal circles, this weak and frightened child was able to withstand some of the historical turning points that Britain went through.

Holden says that Crawford supported and guided the two princesses in the defining years when the sudden coronation of their parents after King Edward VIII abdicated the throne, and during World War II, and there is no doubt that these events, which tempt the authors to turn it into a fairy tale, were certainly terrifying and confusing.

Holden’s novel has sold more than three million copies worldwide, but the “nanny” is her first attempt to go through the midst of historical stories, and even though she has been reading all the books about this era, even she was looking for books that are out of print in second-hand bookstores, but she says The main source for her novel was her imagination.

As for McHugh, who has 30 years of experience in the field of journalism, was finding it difficult to allow herself a degree of freedom in the fabric of some imaginary events.

Her novel “A Pure English Princess” deals with the life of Princess Vicky, the eldest daughter of Queen Victoria and the troubled times in her life. Princess Vicky was used to achieve political ends, as she married a German prince and gave birth to Kaiser Wilhelm II, who threw his country into World War I.

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“I was as credible as possible,” says McHugh, who lives in Washington but hails from London, and her great-grandfather drove the car that was carrying Princess Vicky and her brother King Edward VII to the royal residence in the Isle of White. “How can I accurately imagine the life of a princess who has become?” Empress of Germany, then a lonely widow who lives in a huge mansion and is hated by her son.

Novelist Sandra Newman advised her to “penetrate into her mind and stay inside”. The letters that Vicky wrote to her mother were a great help for her in writing the novel, especially because McHugh noticed some similarities between Vicky’s story and many of the stories she had experienced before.

“The royal family is a family in the end,” says McHugh, “and between its members the usual problems that occur in any family, such as rivalries and grudging comparisons, arise.”

This leads us to another difference between the royal family and the usual families, for while each of us chart his own career outside his family, the lesson in the royal family is the lineage. It is almost impossible for the royals to achieve anything contrary to their luck at birth. Nothing is as important as the arrangement between sisters and gender.

McHugh says Vicky was distinguished from the start among her eight sisters, as she was not only the eldest daughter, but also the smartest and most competent of Queen Victoria’s children.

Vicky was bold and optimistic, she attended scientific lectures, read books and novels, and her father taught her the history and government systems, but she did not have any opportunity to inherit the throne, nor was she allowed for her ingenuity and distinction to choose her career path, and when she reached the age of 17 she left the golden cage to another cage more A restriction when she married the German Emperor and King Frederick III of Prussia, in fulfillment of her father’s goals of introducing modern democracy to Germany.

McHugh describes the real emotional attraction between the princess and the emperor who was newly married, even though it was a political marriage that kept her away from her family, and one scene embodies the magic of the princesses’ lives, as Vicky, a girl who knows that she has little luck of beauty, attends a party in France wearing a remarkable dress designed for her by Empress Eugenie The same, it consists of six layers of white lace and decorated with floral marigold edges and bouquets of artificial flowers. Entering the Palace of Versailles was like entering a huge jewel encrusted treasure.

But McHugh thinks that raising Vicky as a distinguished girl has hurt her socially, as she raised Vicky to trust her opinions and be indifferent to the opinions of others, perhaps because no one told her the truth. Her father praised and praised her to such an extent that her mother, who used to reprimand her, jealous of her.

Even after her death, her position diminished her popularity, and McHugh says, “Vicky was not appreciated in the history books, and she was described as unsuccessful and a pathetic figure, and it reached its climax when Freud analyzed her faults after he saw her body.”

For McHugh, Princess Vicky was a fiery wit and did her best in a strange, sly, misogynistic world. This dimension of Vicky’s character helped McHugh elicit sympathy for her in the novel.

This dimension gives her novel a modern character. Women of the royal family in the last two centuries, from Princess Diana to the Duchesses of Cambridge and Sussex, continue to be subjected to misogynistic rulings.

“We live in a different world, and are far better than the past,” says McHugh. “That is why I hope that the efforts made by women will find an echo so that they become a source of positive energy at the political and family level.”

But the royal families are changing. Marion Caroford may have been prevented from contacting the Queen, but this does not prevent she had been working for the royal family for nearly two decades, and according to Holden, she had a great influence on the Queen’s views throughout her reign.

“When people talk about the queen’s benevolence and her ability to win over the public, the two features that cement her royal influence, I immediately remember Crawford,” Holden says.

In reality, however, events repeat patterns in the epic narrative. The Duchess of Sachs, for example, barely entered Windsor Palace until she left after the events she encountered.

McHugh points out that the royal family embodies wealth and power, but that they are also normal human beings bound in strange and distorted circumstances.

“I think this leads us to question how heavy the cost of belonging to the royal family is, especially because its members are sometimes exploited for political ends,” says McHugh.

Despite the freedom that the author enjoys when dealing with the characters in his novel, these literary novels cast a clear and revealing look at the strange life behind the doors of the palaces.

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