The Queen Mother, The Scottish Castle Girl Who Never Expected to Be Queen | History for Sleep

There is a slab of black marble set into the floor of Westminster Abbey that nobody is permitted to walk across. On her wedding day in 1923, a young woman stopped beside it and laid her own bridal roses down on the stone. Nobody had asked her to. She did it for a brother killed in France and never brought home, and every royal bride since has copied her. This is the story of Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, who grew up in a pink sandstone castle in Angus with nine siblings and seventy rooms, who turned down a royal marriage proposal twice, and who found herself queen anyway after an abdication that changed everything. It traces her childhood at Glamis, the castle's old legends and rumoured hidden rooms, the ward of wounded soldiers she helped nurse in World War One, and the long quiet years before the crown arrived in a way nobody had planned. A calm and unhurried portrait of the woman the world came to know as the Queen Mother.