King Alexander I & Aspasia Manos

[AlexM.]

......Two years before mummie had gone to Venice and bought a most beautiful garden, nine acres of it, bounded by a canal on one side and a lagoon on the other. It had belonged to an elderly aunt of the Rt. Hon. Sir Anthony Eden (now Prime Minister of Great Britain), and so we called it the Giardino Eden Eden Garden. One sight of it makes everyone call it the Garden of Eden, for it is a riotous wealth of all the loveliest flowers which bloom in that lush and sunny climate. This was the first step towards a promise mummie had been making to me ever since I went to school: “One day, Sandra, we'll have a real home of our own.”
Every Christmas, and for every birthday present I always asked first for a "home of our own ". All the girls at school had one, but, as with everything else, I was different. I had no home, I was always “staying” with somebody, or “staying” with mummie in a hotel.
Now mummie had built a real home for us in the beautiful garden in Venice, a little villa, just as I wanted. This was home, a small, a lovely and a real home, and it was all ours, mummie's and mine. Apart from my very own bedroom, the balcony of which gave onto the gardens, I had my own rowing boat too. I could sail it in the lagoon and the swimming pool, which was filled with water from an artesian well in the garden.
Mummie decided I must learn to speak Italian fluently now that we were living in Italy, so in the holidays a governess was engaged to look after me. She was called Signorina Carnesecchi (in English “Miss Dried Meat”) and on the first day she met me she was, without doubt “Miss Very Wet Meat”, and it was all my fault.
The black haired Signorina was nervous and very much in awe of my mother, La Principessa, as she called her. She was in mourning for her mother when she arrived, dressed entirely in black, her long hair pinned in a mournful black bun in the nape of her neck, and her hands encased in black cotton gloves. 1 was to have my lessons out of doors, and the Signorina looked strangely out of place in the colourful care free garden, muffled in her precise black garments. After an hour I grew fidgety, and took her to see my rowing boat. It was floating upside down on the swimming pool, as it had a leak, and it was just beyond my reach.
“Please give it a push for me, Signorina”, I asked, wanting to show it to her properly. But her English and my Italian were not good enough. She thought I meant her to get in it, and with a gargantuan effort she tried to upend the boat. She over balanced and fell on top of it. She and the boat went straight to tile bottom. I shrieked, signorina bubbled, and then emerged looking like a funereal mermaid, with her long black hair bedraggling over her white face, and her black clothes clinging to her. Poor thing, she was distraught, not at her own plight, but that my mother, La Principessa, should see her like that, on her first morning with us. “She think I 'ave no dignity, your highness," she explained to me tragically, and she begged me to hide her from mummie. We found a hiding place behind some tall flowers where it was very hot. There I helped to cook the signorina in the bright sunshine till she gently steamed out. When mummie came to look for us, some time later, I had a dry governess and a firm friend, for mummie never knew of her baptism, and I never told her.

We had a gondolier in Venice, too, and fie took us in the gondola along the canal outside our " front door " and into the city when we went out.
Unhappy schooldays
A part for Alexandras book
FOR A KING LOVE

MARC thanks a lot for your help

[Marc]

No,please-thank you for those lovely parts of Alexandra's book...I am wondering are there any parts witchdescribe her(and her mother's) relations with other royal(or unroyal,but mostly noble-from her mothers side) cousins and also is there any part witch desribes her marriage to Peter and Alexandra's relations with in law family,since her mother in law Mignon did not want this marriage...?Thanks

[AlexM.]

WAR CHANGES EVERYTHING
Chapter 4

"....PRINCESS IRENE of Greece, Aunty Tim, was marrying the Duke of Spoletto (who later became the Duke of Aosta) in the surnmer of I938, so mummie and I left the Paris season early to go to the wedding in Florence before going on to Venice. This was my first “grown up” holiday. School was behind me I had made my debut and everyone kept telling me of the wonderful years they hoped would lie ahead for “a sweet princess, so sweetly seventeen”.

But already their words were touched with wistfulness. I moved in international society, mixing with people of many nationalities and races who, already, saw the shadow of Hitler slanting across Europe. I, myself, was not really aware of this. I was too busy enjoying myself.

The Melchetts came to Venice, with a yacht in which they took us sailing along the Dalmatian coast of Yugoslavia. I remember scrambling ashore there one day, only to be halted by a most fearsome looking guard who shouted at me ferociously. I muttered hasty apologies, and scrambled down the cliff again. Neither he nor I had the slightest notion that in six years' time I was to marry his King.

We spent some time on the lovely island of Brione, where no motor car was allowed, and we passed the blue and golden Mediterranean days in idle luxury with Auntie Sitta (Queen Helen of Rumania) and Michael.

Back we went to Venice, because Philip was coming to spend part of his holidays with us, and to this I was looking forward, very conscious of the fact that I was now " out " and could join in the party making and high spirited fun for which my dashing young cousin already had a reputation. Uncle Andrea had sent him to mummie with the strict injunction that he was “to behave himself”....

Continue.....

[AlexM.]

From chapter 4


......But unfortunately Philip treated me with the same cousinly candour that he had always used, reserving his more romantic moments for other girls more sophisticated than I  girls whom he took out in my speedboat for hours at a time while I was left, a wallflower, on the shore! After this irritating behaviour on his part we had a thoroughly cousinly scrap. We had riot grown up so much after all.

When Gwen Melchett decided to return to England I went with her for a while, and while I was with her she contracted typhoid. She was very seriously ill, and doctors advised another recuperative holiday for her. That was how it came about that we all went to St. Moritz together for Christmas. My other cousin, David Milford Haven, joined us there and also Phillip's father, Uncle Andrea, and my great friend, Lorna Harmsworth.

I had always been crazy about ski ing, and, to my delight, it was a sport in which I excelled. Now mummie and I ski ed all day. We entered for every race we could, and great was my pride when I beat mummie, to win the Captain Beddington Behrens Challenge Cup.

It was such a lovely winter and spring that I commenced to keep a scrap book, treasuring the pictures and accounts of my ski ing achievements, the odd snap shots taken of me at the various dances I went to in the evenings, and of the gay young people who were my friends ... but the scrap book came to an abrupt halt. War was only six months away. There were no wonderful years ahead after all for a seven teen years old princess.

At first, though Britain and France were at war with Germany, we could not really believe it was war. There was no fighting, and in Paris, not even a hint of the grimness and terror that were to follow so rapidly.

Mummie and I went to Mme Cotnareanu's great newspaper organization, Le Figaro, to pack parcels for the troops. Then, at Christmas, we went to London for a brief stay, first at Claridges, then at Buckhurst Park, Ascot, where Lady Deterding then lived.

Back to Paris, then on to Rome, mummie distractedly trying to plan how we could assemble our two homes, the one in Paris, the other in Venice. As it was still too cold to open our home in Venice she decided we would await tile warmer weather in Rome. How changed was that sunny, once friendly city.

Its broad streets were filled with hateful placards shouting   “Down with the British”

Mummie and I enjoyed being defiant in our small way, and always speaking to each other in English. This was forbidden in the streets, restaurants and shops, and always we were rudely reprimanded so we talked English all the more loudly.

In diplomatic circles relations were strained to a grotesque degree. At a neutral Embassy reception we noticed that the German and British diplomats coldly and deliberately ignored each other. Arid, after a reception given for me by the British Ambassador, Sir Percy Loraine, and his wife, we left to find that all the British cars outside the Embassy had had their tyres slit, and their petrol tanks filled with sand. The atmosphere was menacing and sullen with hate. It was my First experience of the antagonism and bitterness which the ordinary people of one nation can brew and foster against those of another. It chilled me with apprehension. If people could be so vicious only with gestures and words, how would they behave with bayonets and dive bombers?
It was not long, before I knew.
We had moved into Venice and were living each day fretfully. It seemed wrong to be doing nothing, yet where and when did one move to start doing something?
Mummie was obsessed with the need to return to nursing. She wished that I too should be trained as a nurse. Nursing, packing parcels, interpreting . . . I didn't mind what I did as long as I was occupied. I did not pretend to myself that this was either patriotism or philanthropy. It was merely that, at nineteen, I was beginning to understand some of my problems, and, in a purely personal way, the war was helping me to do this. My mind was slowly emerging from its chrysalis stage: it did not want to emerge as a butterfly. Yet it was neither trained nor equipped for anything else. There lay the cause of my troubles.
I had been born a Royal princess into a world which, even then, scarcely existed for such creatures. Within months of my birth there were no palaces, no wealth, and no purpose left in my own Royal House for a princess such as I.
Yet, with the laboured and deeply instilled belief in the “Divine Right of Kings”, my mother and my family had wholly disregarded this. I was brought up, educated and instructed as befitting the member of a Royal family. To have done otherwise with me simply would not have occurred to them. They had not arranged my life thus purposely; they had done it instinctively. How else, they would have asked in uncomprehending astonishment, would one rear a princess? A question that, even now, I would find difficult to answer logically.
In Royal families one does not question one's heritage. But what was my heritage?

[AlexM.]

Chapter 4

......From childhood the milestones in my life had been clearly marked and unanimously accepted. Nannies, governesses, boarding school, finishing school, debut and then the unspoken, but nevertheless most firmly accepted course of all marriage, preferably with a member of another Royal House. This would set the seal on the completion, success and fulfilment of all my upbringing.
Useless then to turn to any member of my family, least of all my mother, and ask, simply, why?
To them it would have been more absurd than to ask why the sun rose and set, or why I had been born. If I received any answer at all, it would have been a long and involved treatise on the mystic, symbolic and spiritual duties of kings and their heirs, all of which I knew, and all of which I could have accepted also, had I been a King, or even a Queen. I was neither.
Marriage then  eligible marriage  had been the career for which I had been trained. That and the “talent” of meeting, mixing with, and understanding my fellow men and women. But, I thought, how could I fully understand them when I was forced always to be a little “set apart” when my fellow men and women were carefully selected to form part of the social and blue blooded cocoon of the Royal world; when even a young man who wanted to " date " me had to call me Ma'am, unless he was one of my Royal cousins.
This was revolutionary thinking, and I dared not discuss it with anyone. With what argument could I defend myself? I could think of none. Had I possessed a “vocation” there had been ample opportunity for me to demonstrate this at school, but I was no scholar.
Nor, I found, did I dislike the idea of “marriage as a career ". On the contrary, I welcomed it. Had I not always longed for a home of my own, and were not aII my day dreams centred on what I would do once I had my own home and my own babies? But I wondered, with all the romantic wistfulness of nineteen, whether my destiny might only bring its happiness if I could fall in love, and gain permission to marry some " ordinary " middle class man who would not want a social life, but who would forever be glad to be at home, just with me and the babies. That, I am afraid, was all that such a marriage meant to me then. I never took into account that there would be no maid, no cook, no nanny, no car if I married my ordinary home loving, working man. Money never entered my scheme of things. I had absolutely no knowledge of money. I had never handled it, never carried a purse, and did not know the actual cost or any single thing. When I wanted to buy something I requested mummie's permission, signed for it, and all the bills were always sent to her. One shadow, which had darkened the lives of several of my aunts and cousins, never, never troubled me. I knew that never would I be persuaded to marry any man with whom I was not completely in love. Mummie, who had known brief but total happiness in her own marriage, and, in contrast, seen the distress which loveless, arranged marriages had brought to others, would never entertain such a union for me. This I knew. “In Royal families there is no such thing as divorce”, was one of her edicts, “therefore there should be no marriage without love”. So firm were both these convictions of hers that she supremely disregarded the unalterable facts that there were divorces in Royal families, especially in our own, since the marriage of her brother in law, King George II of Greece, to Elizabeth of Rumania was dissolved, as also had been that of her sister in law Helen, to King Carol of Rumania. That my uncle Georgic had never re married, and that Aunty Sitta was still the Queen of Rumania made it possible for my mother simply to ignore the facts. She neither mentioned nor acknowledged these divorces. But in the uncertainty of that summer such thoughts and prospects were remote. I was going, to be able to think about working, and as I have said, we were living fretfully in the false peace. On the morning of I0 June, I940, I had been swimming at the Lido, not far from our house, when I noticed everyone crowding to the terrace of the Excelsior Hotel. I sensed urgency and anxiety in this crowd, and in my wet swimming suit I joined it. The Italian radio announcer was warning everyone to stand by for an important announcement. In a few minutes Mussolini was going to speak. His heavy, bull like voice shuddered through the Hotel. He was declaring a state of war between Italy and Britain and France. I noticed two English nannies, oblivious of their charges, weeping bitterly. I went back to the villa to see if mummie had heard the news. I felt shocked, yet curiously relieved, almost exhilarated. Now at last one knew where one was. Now we should be able to do something. But the first evidence of war came in a manner we had not expected. Poor Mac Doodle was arrested by Italian security police and interned. She was now a British “enemy”. Mummie had been planning to return to Paris to collect and store our furniture and most of our personal belongings which we had left there. But now, with poor Mac interned, and news of the German and Italian advance into France, we knew this would be impossible. We could not leave Venice.......

Are you bowring?
All these post are from book FROM A KING'S LOVE
By queen Alexandra of Yugoslavia

[AlexM.]

WAR CHANGES EVERYTHING
     Continue from foregoing post

……Sensing impending disaster mummie determined she would try to save at least one of our possessions, our car. She went on a breakneck drive to Switzerland iii order to garage the vehicle there for the duration, and I set about finding some way to make poor Mac Doodle's internment more comfortable. She was detained in a place called Abano, not far from Venice. Knowing the haphazard methods of the Italians, I soon discovered it was fairly easy to smuggle her out and bring her to Venice for the day.

This soon stopped.

The phone rang at the villa on the afternoon of 28 October. I saw mummie's hand gripping the receiver tightly as she listened to the caller. It was the Greek Ambassador. Italy had invaded Greece. We too now were “enemies”, and we were instructed to pack a few essential things immediately and be prepared to join the diplomatic train which would take us to Athens. Mac Doodle was to be allowed to come with us.

The next hours were one incredible rush. No time to sort out clothes, or to pack in any kind of order; no time to attend to the thousand things that scream for attention when one knows one is leaving one's home for years if not for good. Scarcely time in which to say a sad farewell and God speed to our faithful gondolier and his wife, Emilio and Italia, and their daughter Ilia. Should we ever meet again? We did not know.

Just before leaving I ran back tip tile stairs for one more look at my little bedroom. Mummie's voice, shrill with anxiety, called to me to hurry, but I went, for what was possibly the last time, on to my balcony and gazed into my lovely garden. The sun shone brightly, the sky was blue, everything seemed unchanged in the gentle scene. Impossible to believe that all this, my own home, would not exist for me any more. I would return. “Good bye, my little room, I'll come back” I whispered the promise and ran down to join mummie.

We started on the first of our many nightmare journeys to freedom.
Arrangements had been made between Greece and Italy each to run a train into Yugoslavia, repatriating Italian and Greek nationals. The trains would meet at Belgrade, whereupon we would disembark and change into the Greek train which would return to Athens. The Italians from Greece would take our places in their own train and first the journey was bathos after the panic and speed of our warning and departure. On board with us were members of the Greek Embassy and a very elderly aunt of mine, Aunt Minnie, who insisted I play backgammon with her all the way to Belgrade. We were in the station there for one hour, and Prince Alexander of Yugoslavia, a first cousin of King Peter, was there to greet us. I might have met my future husband then, if he had not been so averse to meeting his relatives. Years later he confessed to me that his Uncle Paul had suggested greeting us at tile station, but he had refused, saying he didn't want to meet "a lot of silly relations". When Alexander told him that I was very pretty, and he had liked me very much Peter scoffed:  “She's bound to be terrible then, if you like her”

The change of trains did us no good at all. The Italians had put on de luxe coaches to cover their part of the journey. Tile Greeks had had to send a frightful wreck in which we were to travel home, as all their trains had been commandeered for their few valiant troops in their supreme war effort.

During the whole of that four days' Journey we were without food, and water to drink, let alone water to wash in. We already looked like refugees when the family met us at Athens. Never had I taken a bath with so much pleasure as I did that first night there, in the George I Hotel......

[AlexM.]

......For a brief moment the world seemed to right itself. It seemed unlikely that Athens would be in the direct war zone, and mummie rented a house there. Our days fell into their almost normal routine. Mummie was nursing at the hospital each morning, and Freddie (Crown Princess Frederika) and I visited the wards, wrote letters for the wounded, helped at the Red Cross units and generally tried to do what we could. . Each day we lunched at the golf club, and then, because mummie insisted that I spend at least three hours a day in the open air because of my earlier inclination to T.B., we always played golf until dusk.

Each evening the family gathered together, either at the Palace with the King (Uncle George) or at one of our homes. Many of them were in Athens again now since war had driven them from most parts of Europe except Britain.

Even Philip, now a midshipman in the British Royal Navy, and on active service in the battleship Valiant, was with us for a few days. I never met a boy more itching for a scrap. “We'll finish this war in twelve months,” he jubilantly informed our elders. They seemed to think this optimistic. I thought twelve months sounded like eternity.

Freddie and my uncle Palo now had two babies, Princess Sophia, just two, and five months old Prince Constantine. My Aunt Katherine, my father's youngest sister, was there, and also another of my great-uncles, Prince George (called Old Uncle George to distinguish him from Uncle George, the King), and his French wife, Aunt Marie.

Old Uncle George was an enormous man, at least six feet four inches tall, with a vast memory which he was fond of airing in an immense voice. He shouted all the time, in Greek, English and often in French because his wife, Aunt Marie, insisted that he should speak her language. Old Uncle George lived on memories of past battles, revolutions and naval service.

Aunt Marie, a devoted friend and disciple of Freud she had helped him to escape from Vienna was immersed in her own versions of psychology and psychiatry. She also had a mania for photography.

This, then, was the family group in Athens in the spring of I94I. Mummie and I had been there nearly four months and we had been warned that soon we should all have to leave. The warning came two weeks before our evacuation so that this time we were a little more prepared for flight.

All possessions and clothes we had packed in trunks and sent them away, together with the faithful MacDoodle, on board a Greek destroyer bound for Crete.

Air raids had begun, and each night we packed an emergency suitcase, and placed it beside our beds, sleeping with one car open for either the air raid siren, or the telephone call which would tell us to leave at once. Even with all these precautions the Germans were upon us before we expected.

Mummie and I had gone to bed that April night when the siren went. We called to each other from our bedrooms, deciding we could not get up until we heard the planes more distinctly.

The drone of enemy aircraft increased rapidly, and, as the crunch of the first bombs made our little house tremble, the telephone rang. This was it.

“A car will fetch you in ten minutes”, a man's voice barked over the line. “The German armies are twenty four hours away”.

Mummie and I dressed quickly, our fingers fumbling with buttons and hooks, awkward in our haste and tension. We grabbed our tiny suitcases and stumbled through the dark house to the front door.

The car was already there, and the starry night was ripped by the whine of tracer bullets and the fingers of searchlights.

We scrambled into the car, grateful for its shelter from the crackling shrapnel, and the driver raced grimly through the familiar streets of my native city to the harbour, where a British Sunderland flying boat awaited us....

[AlexM.]

WAR CHANGES EVERYTHING
     Continue


....All around was a sea of fire and an inferno of explosions. A convoy had just been bombed.

In the sultry awful blaze we saw Uncle George (the King), Freddie, and Uncle Palo, Freddie and her Scots Nannie trying to hush the babies who were crying loudly. Aunt Katherine was counting people and suitcases, the pilot was urging us to board the plane, and then there was a bellow and a roar  old Uncle George and Aunt Marie had arrived. He, as usual, was shouting his head off. And she ... !!

Mummie's mouth fell half open in amazement. I took one look, and, forgetting the shrapnel, bombs and all else, laughed. Aunt Marie had started the flight for freedom (via the bomb rack of a bomber) dressed impeccably for Ascot, complete with huge cartwheel floppy hat, an ermine wrap, and carrying a cine camera.

An impatient hand dragged me into the plane. We called frantic good byes to Uncle Georgic and Uncle Palo as we were herded into the bomb bays. The door slammed, the 'plane taxied lurching along the sea. As it paused to rev. Its engines I would swear I could hear, above the racket, the united thudding of all our hearts. Then the engines roared and we were airborne, flying to Crete, and beyond, into the unknown.

No one slept through the long, uncomfortable, and bitterly cold flight. Huddled in the bomb bays we whispered odd comfort to each other, took it in turns to nurse the babies.

Spring, undeterred, had dressed the morning of our escape with all the loveliness of a Mediterranean dawn....

[AlexM.]

......It was about 5 a.m. when we stumbled, half dazed, half numbed, onto the jetty at Souda Bay, and smelled the fresh, sweet air. Again the babies were crying. Freddie was anxiously seeking some shelter where she could feed and change them.

Aunt Marie was handing me her absurd beige hat, and winding her cine camera. “Hold the hat, Sandra, this time I must take a picture. This is history”, she was saying. Then we saw, heard, felt, the blackness of approaching 'planes.

Falling bombs whined. Punishing clouds of torn earth and cement flayed us. Through the terrifying noise we heard the shouts and screams of those wounded, and those trying to lead us to the nearest slit trench. There we lay, in between the explosions, singing “Three Blind Mice” to quieten Freddie's babies.

At last the bombers went. Grey and filthy with dust and rubble, half deafened by the noise, we were rushed to an assembled line of ramshackle cars. In these we started an eight hours' drive over cart tracks and farm lands that I am forever unable to forget. A picture of them remains in my mind as though I am looking at confused sequences of a film in vivid Technicolor.

One moment I was dazzled by the sapphire sea, dancing and shining under the sun, almost lapping the edges of the deep golden wheat fields. Then all is the orange reddish colour of egg yolk, as, with the eyes screwed shut, I grovel tinder that wheat, sweating and almost beyond terror, while German planes roar and screech down on me.

Their machine guns bat out hideous noise, while bullets shriek and whistle like a thousand mad demons. I do not recall how often our convoy was stopped thus, or how often we had to dive to the shelter of hedges and wheat fields. It seemed to happen every half hour. I hear the babies, grimy with dust, red eyed with exhaustion, crying and whimpering. I see Aunt Marie, her long flowing gown of dark blue silk patterned with white flowers now torn and filthy beyond description, imperiously handing me her unmanageable hat to hold, while she doggedly persists in trying to film some of these scenes. I hear old Uncle George roaring.

Curiously I remember the small discomforts more than the great ones . . . a piece of grit in my eye, a painful scratching from thorns as I crawled frantically for shelter, a grazed knee.

Once we cowered from a flight of bombers, only to be told afterwards that they were the remnants of the escaping Yugoslav Royal Air Force. A ragged little group, we emerged from the thicket and cheered them.

All, it seemed, was total, grimacing, horrible madness. There was no sane world left any more.

At some stage of that terrible day we halted for a meal. While we were eating I saw two young men, unshaven, bedraggled and dressed in a ludicrous assortment of garments, coming towards us. Now, I thought, Fiv gone off my head, for each carried a walking stick over his shoulder on the ends of which were slung bundles tied up in gaudy pieces of cloth. They both looked exactly like Dick Whittington.

I knew instinctively that no one but an Englishman could look so nonchalant and so poised in such a get up. English they were, very much so and great friends of ours, Ronald Fleming and John Beith, members of His Britannic Majesty's Embassy. They told us they had been escaping n a yacht, and the…Jerries had dropped a bomb right down the . . . funnel.

They were charming, sweet, and hilariously funny over their escape from death. The only things they had salvaged from the wreck were their lives and their walking sticks. At that moment they did more for our morale than a dozen British and New Zealand divisions on the spot could have done.

By evening we reached our haven, a small rickety hotel which stood on the edge of a minute hill village. Here there was water and beds. We staggered to them, doubling tip together in the small rooms. Tonight we would sleep in temporary safety and in peace.

But after the first few hours of exhausted unconsciousness I awoke. I was hot, uncomfortable and scratching violently. The whole of my body was itching ferociously. I lit a candle, and muffled a scream. My bed was alive ... The next battle started, to be waged unceasingly during the whole of the next eight weird and fantastic days we were to five in this mountain hide out the Battle of the Bed Bugs.


Of the  book FOR A KINGS LOVE
BY Queen Alexandra of Yugoslavia

[Modena]

During the WWI, King Constantine, against the wishes of his Prime Minister, refused to side with the Allies. He was eventually forced to flee the country. The Allies then refused to accept his son, George, as king because of his background in the German military. That's why Alexander was chosen.
He was bitten by a monkey & died of septicaemia.

Didn't Constantine want to remain neutral? It couldn't have been easy either being the brother-in-law of the Kaiser.  

[Modena]

I know this will sound strange but in this picture Alexander I of Greece resembles King Carol II of Roumania.  I sumize it is the russian coming out.  

Alexander II was certainly a good looking man.

For some reason, I see his maternal grandfather, Kaiser Frederick III   A subtle resemblance perhaps.

[Janet]

Who was/were the person(s) who ghost-wrote Alexandra's books for her?

[isabel]

Princess Alexandra of Greece, in needed of money, relsolved with a british publishing, to published her memorys.

The writer was a woman, JOAN REEDER.

Later, in 1959, Alexandra resolved again a biography of her cousin, Philiph, The Duke of Edinburgh, also writen by Mrs. Reeder. In despite of Alexandra´s good terms with the English Royal Family, the book was not well welcomed in Buckingham.

[Marc]

Why?

[isabel]

It seems that the book was very poor, without interest, and not very well writed.