We ran a nice essay by writer William Kuhn yesterday about his new fictional book "Mrs Queen Takes The Train," in which he imagines the monarch slipping away from her minders to take a train trip to Scotland incognito.
We can't help but wonder if he was inspired by a little-reported moment in 1945 when the Queen and her sister Princess Margaret snuck out of Buckingham Palace to join the celebrations on the streets of London at the end of World War II.
The adventure is to be the subject of both a book and a film coming out next year, according to the Daily Mail's Richard Kay, who writes:Girls Night Out will star Juno Temple as the 19-year-old Princess Elizabeth who was accompanied on VE-Day by her sister and Lord Porchester. But the film will not appear until after the publication in January of writer Peter Bradshaw’s A Night Of Triumph in which he fictionalises elements of the adventure. He says: ‘Elizabeth and Margaret did mix anonymously with the crowd and a lot happened that night. But I have them going to a club where they meet Noel Coward and (the homosexual MP) Tom Driberg and the Queen becomes fascinated with what were then called thirty-shilling prostitutes.
‘It was the first time Elizabeth and Margaret had been out in the real world.’