The Peoples King by Susan Williams Read Free Book Online Page A

unscrew the lock with a nail file, but I had to give up when I found I could not stir the screws. As the afternoon wore on and evening came, I was seized with panic at the thought that Win might mean to keep me a prisoner all night .
    Eventually she heard the sound of a key turning in the lock:
    But the door did not open, and I was afraid to try the handle myself. When I finally got up enough courage to do so, the apartment was in darkness. I could hear Win's breathing from the bed. The rest of the night I spent on the sofa in the living-room, endlessly reviewing the events that had led to my personal catastrophe.''
    By morning, Wallis knew that she had to leave Win, and she went to live with her mother. She gave Win one more chance, sailing to the Far East to join him at a naval posting, but realized that he would never stop drinking. She despaired of the marriage, and obtained a divorce in 1927.
    While living on her own, she had grown to like Ernest Aldrich Simpson, a shipbroker she had met in New York. Rather tall and with a slight dark moustache, he was much attracted - being himself a serious and prosaic sort of man - by Wallis's fresh and lively spirit. Although a New Yorker who had been born in America, Ernest Simpson was of British parentage and had enlisted in the Coldstream Guards for the duration of the war. In 1928 he moved to London to take over his family's shipping business, and asked Wallis, now thirty-two, to join him. She crossed the Atlantic, and they were married in July. At first they were quite well off, but like many others they were hit by the Depression of 1929, which was a disaster for Ernest's shipping firm and slashed the value of some shares Wallis had been given by her uncle.

    She found it difficult to settle down to British ways. American slang, she wrote in her memoirs, was practically never heard in Mayfair drawing rooms - and it was not welcomed. 'When with characteristic impulsiveness I agreed to something with a cheery "O.K.",' she wrote, 'my sister-in-law stared at me with an expression of shock and dis­appointment that could not have been more in evidence had I dropped an "h".' 16 She was astonished by the deference to titles, which seemed to her 'almost irrational in a country otherwise so democratic. If one was a Lady Vere de Vere there was never any difficulty about opening charge accounts, and salespeople fell over themselves for the privilege of serving a title.' Reading the Court Circular, the daily list of the monarch's official engagements, she was surprised that an entire nation should follow 'with such rapt attention the purely formal goings and comings of a single family'. But her greatest difficulty, she found, was her habit of speaking her mind. By contrast with American women, she thought, English women 'were still accepting the status ... of a second sex. If they had strong opinions they kept them safely buttoned up, confidences were seldom given or encouraged.' 17 Despite these obstacles, Wallis settled down cheerfully to life in London. She enjoyed organizing their home, especially when they moved to 5 Bryanston Court, in the Marylebone area. Unlike Win, Ernest was steady and dependable, and the couple got on well with each other. In any case, Wallis felt now that she had to recognize the limits of middle age. Sailing back to London from a holiday in the USA in 1933, she wondered with dismay if this would be the last time she would be able to enjoy the feeling of youth. 'I know it really was my swan song,' she wrote to her aunt, 'unless I can hang onto my figure and take a trip before I'm 40 which is only 3 years off.' 18
    It was just a couple of years after her arrival in London and her second wedding, that Wallis first met the Prince of Wales - Prince Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David, known to his immediate family and friends simply as David. In the autumn of 1930, Wallis and Ernest were invited to a dinner party at the home of the sister of Thelma,