Daily Mail, Tuesday 1st April, 2003
Pages 30/31
Both girls
revealed their rebelliousness at an early age. One visitor
recalled seeing Caroline race into a room where Grace was having
lunch and send a beautiful vase smashing to the ground.
`Caroline!` shreiked
Grace. `Your father will be furious with you. that was a gift
from Sir Winston Churchill.`
The little girl
stopped for a moment, looked up at her mother, and sneered: `So
what, Grace?` before running from the room.
That piece of defiance
earned an instant smacking. The children also had a British
governess who was so strict she rejoiced in the knickname
`Killer.`
Grace was a
disciplinarian who showed no sympathy with her daughters when
they kicked against the restrictions of palace life. It was as if
she had forgotten how she, too, had chafed against them when she
married into the royal family at the age of 26.
Princess Caroline
recalled: `My mother was very strict and over protective. I was
14 when I started to see there were things my friends could do
that we weren`t allowed to do.
`She was always
impeccable down to the smallest detail, and we had to dress
properly all the time. She wouldn`t let me wear a bikini like
other girls. She thought it improper.`
But if the children
felt repressed, it did not appear so to others. The world saw
Caroline and Stephanie as haughty, naughty and spoilt. This, too,
was Grace`s fault. In public, she would never chastise them; at
royal functions, the little girls would run amok and she simply
ignored them.
Back behind palace
walls however, the girls would be spanked, even as teenagers, and
their few privileges revoked.