Charles loved his blue pedal car but Anne would grab it off him
WHEN Anne and Charles were children, they’d sometimes be taken to visit their father’s friend and private secretary, Mike Parker.
Far from being on their best behaviour at his home in Kensington, West London, the prince and his younger sister would inevitably start squabbling. ‘There were terrible scenes,’ recalled Parker’s wife Eileen.
Despite being nearly two years younger than her brother, the princess was always the aggressor.
‘Anne would boss Charles; she would take command of things,’ said Mrs Parker. ‘If she saw a toy she wanted, she would grab it… Everything he had, she wanted….
‘When [Anne] got really worked up, she would start throwing things at him. She was very strong-willed, a real menace…’
Charles had been given a blue pedal car that he was particularly fond of, but he’d often be unceremoniously bundled out of it by his determined sister.
It was the same with the tricycle they shared: if her brother was on it, Anne was sure to take it away from him.
She was also forever ignoring her nanny’s instructions not to take too many toys out of the toy cupboard — instead
emptying its entire contents on to the floor.
If Anne didn’t get her way, ‘she had the most frightful fit of temper, lying on the floor and kicking’, according to Mrs Parker.
For his part, Charles was surprisingly nice to his little sister (‘perhaps too nice,’ Mrs Parker observed), always inviting her to join in his games, and usually taking a conciliatory attitude towards her excesses.
But not always. One day, Prince Philip presented each of them with a pair of boxing gloves and tried to instruct them in the art of self-defence. Anne and Charles soon set about each other with such fury that he had to take the gloves away.
The Queen, for her part, found her children’s behaviour exasperating.
Once, when the children were staying at Balmoral, Lady Adeane, the wife of the Queen’s private secretary, gave them a paper bag full of mushrooms she’d just picked. A row quickly ensued over who was going to present them to their mother.
They started tugging at the bag, which burst open, spilling its contents over the gravel drive – at which point Anne, who’d just returned from a riding lesson, set about her brother with her riding crop.
Charles burst into tears just as the Queen opened the door. In exasperation, she shouted: ‘ Why can’t you behave yourselves!’ and boxed them both around the ears.
Philip also believed in corporal punishment. So Charles was summarily spanked if he was rude or obstreperous — usually by the nannies.