Dog Diaries #12: Susan

Part of Dog Diaries

Author Kate Klimo
Illustrated by Tim Jessell
Queen Elizabeth II's corgi Susan spills secrets of life in the Royal Family!

Gifted to Princess Elizabeth on her 18th birthday, Susan was the cherished companion of the future monarch—even joining the princess on her honeymoon in 1947! Eight years later, she was in attendance when Elizabeth was crowned Queen. How does a Royal Corgi spend her days? What goes on in the Corgi Room in Buckingham Palace? Susan reveals all, along with details about Elizabeth's work as a lorry driver during World War II—where she learned to take apart an engine and put it back together! With realistic back and white illustrations throughout and a fact-filled appendix, this is the kind of historical fiction that reluctant middle-grade readers will bow down to with respect!
In the kennel where I was born, the story has been passed down from mum to pup for generations. And even though it took place before I was born, I have heard it told so many times that it is written upon my heart.
Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Thelma. She was nine years old when her dog was accidentally run over by a motorcar. Mind you, this was no ordinary accident. The motorcar happened to be driven by the Duke of York, the man who would one day be king of England. But our Thelma didn’t care a fig about that. All she knew was that she had lost her beloved friend, the light of her life. And her heart was broken.
The duke, as you can imagine, felt terrible. With deepest sympathies, he wrote to Thelma’s parents and offered to purchase a new dog for the family. Her parents felt Thelma was too grief-stricken to accept another dog. Ever so politely, they turned down the duke’s generous offer and let Thelma know that they had done so. After a few months, when Thelma’s heart had mended, she wrote the duke a letter. She’d take that new dog now, thank you very much, she told him. But the duke, not wanting to go against the parents’ original wishes, declined to make good on his offer.
There would be no new dog for Thelma at this time. But she soldiered on and eventually grew up to be one of the most famous dog breeders in all of England. At the kennel she founded—known as Rozavel—she raised many a prizewinner. Among them were Alsatians, Scotties, Airedales, chow chows, and Chihuahuas. But her very favorite breed was the corgi. And while she didn’t, strictly speaking, discover corgis, her work did go a long way toward making us famous and getting us officially recognized by the Kennel Club.
Thelma encountered her first corgi as a young gal on holiday in Wales. From the window of her roadster, she saw one dashing across a field on his short but sturdy legs, expertly herding cattle by nipping at their heels. Welsh farmers had been breeding corgis to herd for hundreds of years. What did we herd? Anything that needed herding: sheep, geese, ducks, horses, cattle, sometimes even the farmers’ wayward children. It was from these same farmers that Thelma purchased the very finest specimens of our kind, with an eye to starting her own line. At Rozavel, she set about breeding two types of corgis: the Pembroke Welsh corgi (smaller and with a naturally bobbed tail) and the Cardigan Welsh corgi (bigger than the Pembroke and with a long tail).
So successful was she in her efforts in the 1930s that her Pem stud, Red Dragon, became quite the dog about- town. Thelma sold one of his excellent pups to a member of the royal family, Viscount Weymouth. Now, the viscount’s children happened to be playmates with the young princesses Elizabeth and Margaret Rose—the daughters of the very same Duke of York who had crossed paths with Thelma as a child! The young princesses were so smitten with the viscount’s corgi that they begged their father for one of their own. In short order, the duke summoned Thelma to his residence. She came bearing three charming Pembroke Welsh corgi pups, from which the children were to pick one.
Did Thelma let on to the duke that she was the same little girl whose dog he had run over all those years ago? Like a mysterious stranger in a fairy tale, she chose to keep her identity a secret. After all, that had been a lifetime ago. In this lifetime, breeding superb dogs and finding outstanding homes for them were what interested her.
Naturally, the princesses wanted to keep all three of the pups. But that was not going to happen. Not even princesses get to have everything they wish for. So after much snuggling and soul-searching and royal dithering, they chose Rozavel Golden Eagle. The way I heard it, Golden Eagle became so stuck-up and full of himself from being the pet of princesses that the staff took to calling him “the Duke.” The girls, delighted with the nickname, dubbed him Dookie. Three years later, Dookie was joined by a second corgi from Thelma’s kennel, Lady Jane. Lady Jane and Elizabeth—known as Lilibet to those nearest and dearest—soon became inseparable. The most adorable little book titled Our Princesses and Their Dogs came out just in time for Christmas 1936. It was a picture book full of photographs of Elizabeth and Margaret Rose frolicking with their beloved corgis and other royal dogs.
The same month of the book’s publication, the Duke of York ascended to the throne of England. When the people of England looked upon the pictures in this book, they saw a family with a keen attachment to and understanding of dogs. They knew that their king was a fine master, a good father, and a gentle man. Thanks in part to dogs, the people of England welcomed with open arms their new king, George VI.
Three years later, in 1939, a terrible war broke out between England and Germany. Enemy bombs fell throughout the land, destroying property and taking lives. As an example to their subjects, the king and queen chose to remain in London in the royal residence, Buckingham Palace. The princesses were sent off to the country, to Windsor Castle, behind whose stout stone walls they were kept safe. Watching over them were the officers of the Grenadier Guards, whose job it is to protect the royal family—and the royal corgis as well, although by now there was just one. Dookie had died of old age at the start of the war. Fortunately, Thelma found a mate for Lady Jane, and she soon gave birth to Crackers.
 
 
 
 
 
Tales of a Fourth Grade Fantasy Writer
It all began in the fourth grade when my best friend, Justine and I--inspired by The Chronicles of Narnia, Curdie and the Princess, The Wonderful Journey to the Mushroom Planet, the books of E. Nesbit (and countless other works of fantasy recommended to us by our imperious rouge-cheeked librarian, Mrs. Thackeray)--embarked upon a fantasy epic of our own. We wrote our epic in multi-colored inks (Justine had gotten this nifty set of colored plastic quills for her birthday) in a series of classic black and white composition notebooks, whose white spaces we colored in so that every time we touched them, we got rainbows on our fingertips. I can’t remember the plot but I do know that it featured a cast of unicorns, elves, fairies, and an evil magician whose name, Pezlar, was inspired by our favorite candy. Our characters lived on islands that were shaped in their own likenesses; for instance, the unicorns lived on an island shaped like a unicorn head, where there was, naturally, a Cape Horn and a Beard Bay. Whenever we had writer’s block, we simply drew maps. We were writing (and drawing), not so much for posterity as to conjure a world that, we fervently hoped, would one day open its magical portals and take us in. The world shimmered with latent magic and we lived our days in a state of heightened expectation. When would the magic reveal itself?

Those Magical Oldsters
Taking our cue from the Professor in the Narnia books, Mary Poppins, and Mrs. Pigglewiggle, old people were especially magical to us. Ike Raff, the grumpy old man who owned the cigar store; Charlie Hicks, the seven-foot-tall homeless man who marched in the Memorial Day parade in a full Cherokee regalia, and even the scary Mrs. Thackeray were, we suspected, distinguished emissaries from magical lands. To their credit, they played it straight when, with burning intensity, we asked them such questions as, “Where do you really come from?” and “How did you get here?” “Did you fly, teleport, or use a traveling spell?”

Step right up to the Museum of Magic
Magical talismans were vitally important to us. We collected beach glass, horse chestnuts, antique buttons, old coins, and even a green crystal doorknob. And, yes, we had our own Museum of Magic that we set up in Justine’s side yard, which was just across the street from the beach. I say we set it up. I’m not sure we ever had any paying customers. We were raising funds so that we could buy the fabric to make long hunter-green capes with hoods. These were the outfits we planned to wear when we passed through the magical portals. We must have raised the funds somehow, because we actually stitched up the capes on my mother’s sewing machine. How proud we were of them! So you can imagine how crushed we were when we wore them into town one day and somebody asked us which 4-H troupe we belonged to.

Magical Portals
We looked everywhere for them: Mr. Raff’s cigar store (where we would later buy our Beatles fan mags), an old wooden boat house down at the beach, an abandoned rococo-baroque Victorian mansion near my house just bristling with magical possibilities.
One Friday night, before our favorite TV show, Twilight Zone, came on at 9:30, we took a candle and some matches and made a pilgrimage to the Victorian mansion. It was a cold and windy night, I recall, and when we spied a broken window off the porch, it seemed to say to us, “Trespass, please!” With lit candle, we solemnly walked from room to room, searching for the portal. When we got to the third floor landing, the candle suddenly flared up and then guttered. We screamed and tore out of that place back to my mother’s warm, safe kitchen. Magic, we concluded, was sometimes a pretty scary proposition. We steeled ourselves and determined to make a return trip to the ruined mansion. We never managed that second trip because a wrecker ball rolled in and leveled the site of our closest brush with magic. A branch of the U.S. Post Office took its place and, although we never attempted to break in (Federal Offense!), we did loiter in the foyer, searching for magical signs among the Wanted Posters and the public notices.

Adolescence Rears Its Ugly Head
Looking back on those years, I see that, for us, magic was a kind of pagan belief system. It was both an affirmation of and an escape from life. But maintaining our belief system was not always easy. It was often downright burdensome. We had our rituals to observe, and our obligations, too. (We held weekly classes for our stuffed animals in the faerie arts, complete with lesson plans and demonstration models). Our beliefs isolated us from the other kids (who already suspected we were more than a little bit tetched). There came a time when a kind of low-grade dread began to steal over us; dread of the day when, like Susan Pevense, we would wake up and want to wear lipstick and stockings. And of course, that day did dawn, slowly enough to be agonizing. It started with the Beatles. We simply redirected all that magical intensity in the direction of the Fab 4. Instead of believing in portals, we believed we would one day not only get to meet them, but get to marry them (Justine, John; me, Paul). After that, it was a just small step to wearing lipstick (well, Mary Quant lip gloss, in any case), stockings (fish net), mini skirts (tweed and veddy British) and, before we knew it, we were looking back on our days of magic with patronizing fondness.

Reader, I Wrote
When I grew up, I still wanted to write but writing for children seemed, well, childish. I determined to be a writer of Adult Books, and succeeded (on a very modest level). But what can I tell you? The lack of magic in the adult world, as much from a reader’s standpoint as a writer’s, eventually got to me. I missed the magic, and years later, here I am, drawn back to its portals. I even find myself believing again. I believe that the world in which we live, the world of consensus reality, is but one small room in a mansion full of rooms. I believe that writing and reading are two surefire ways to get access to the other rooms. And nowadays, it is my sole ambition to grow up to be one of those old people who just might be mistaken for a distinguished emissary from a magical land.
Do I fly, teleport, or cast traveling spells?
The answer to all of the above is yes! View titles by Kate Klimo
TIM JESSELL'S work has been recognized by the Society of Illustrators Annual Exhibitions, receiving the Society's Gold Medal Award. He is also the winner of AdWeek Magazine's Illustrator of the Year. His work can be seen in the bestselling series Secrets of Droon, Superhero Christmas (written by Stan Lee of Marvel Comics), and covers for the reissue of Zilpha Keatley Snyder's Newbery Honor Books. Tim has been a guest speaker to professional graphic communication groups and enjoys speaking to student groups as well. View titles by Tim Jessell

About

Queen Elizabeth II's corgi Susan spills secrets of life in the Royal Family!

Gifted to Princess Elizabeth on her 18th birthday, Susan was the cherished companion of the future monarch—even joining the princess on her honeymoon in 1947! Eight years later, she was in attendance when Elizabeth was crowned Queen. How does a Royal Corgi spend her days? What goes on in the Corgi Room in Buckingham Palace? Susan reveals all, along with details about Elizabeth's work as a lorry driver during World War II—where she learned to take apart an engine and put it back together! With realistic back and white illustrations throughout and a fact-filled appendix, this is the kind of historical fiction that reluctant middle-grade readers will bow down to with respect!

Excerpt

In the kennel where I was born, the story has been passed down from mum to pup for generations. And even though it took place before I was born, I have heard it told so many times that it is written upon my heart.
Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Thelma. She was nine years old when her dog was accidentally run over by a motorcar. Mind you, this was no ordinary accident. The motorcar happened to be driven by the Duke of York, the man who would one day be king of England. But our Thelma didn’t care a fig about that. All she knew was that she had lost her beloved friend, the light of her life. And her heart was broken.
The duke, as you can imagine, felt terrible. With deepest sympathies, he wrote to Thelma’s parents and offered to purchase a new dog for the family. Her parents felt Thelma was too grief-stricken to accept another dog. Ever so politely, they turned down the duke’s generous offer and let Thelma know that they had done so. After a few months, when Thelma’s heart had mended, she wrote the duke a letter. She’d take that new dog now, thank you very much, she told him. But the duke, not wanting to go against the parents’ original wishes, declined to make good on his offer.
There would be no new dog for Thelma at this time. But she soldiered on and eventually grew up to be one of the most famous dog breeders in all of England. At the kennel she founded—known as Rozavel—she raised many a prizewinner. Among them were Alsatians, Scotties, Airedales, chow chows, and Chihuahuas. But her very favorite breed was the corgi. And while she didn’t, strictly speaking, discover corgis, her work did go a long way toward making us famous and getting us officially recognized by the Kennel Club.
Thelma encountered her first corgi as a young gal on holiday in Wales. From the window of her roadster, she saw one dashing across a field on his short but sturdy legs, expertly herding cattle by nipping at their heels. Welsh farmers had been breeding corgis to herd for hundreds of years. What did we herd? Anything that needed herding: sheep, geese, ducks, horses, cattle, sometimes even the farmers’ wayward children. It was from these same farmers that Thelma purchased the very finest specimens of our kind, with an eye to starting her own line. At Rozavel, she set about breeding two types of corgis: the Pembroke Welsh corgi (smaller and with a naturally bobbed tail) and the Cardigan Welsh corgi (bigger than the Pembroke and with a long tail).
So successful was she in her efforts in the 1930s that her Pem stud, Red Dragon, became quite the dog about- town. Thelma sold one of his excellent pups to a member of the royal family, Viscount Weymouth. Now, the viscount’s children happened to be playmates with the young princesses Elizabeth and Margaret Rose—the daughters of the very same Duke of York who had crossed paths with Thelma as a child! The young princesses were so smitten with the viscount’s corgi that they begged their father for one of their own. In short order, the duke summoned Thelma to his residence. She came bearing three charming Pembroke Welsh corgi pups, from which the children were to pick one.
Did Thelma let on to the duke that she was the same little girl whose dog he had run over all those years ago? Like a mysterious stranger in a fairy tale, she chose to keep her identity a secret. After all, that had been a lifetime ago. In this lifetime, breeding superb dogs and finding outstanding homes for them were what interested her.
Naturally, the princesses wanted to keep all three of the pups. But that was not going to happen. Not even princesses get to have everything they wish for. So after much snuggling and soul-searching and royal dithering, they chose Rozavel Golden Eagle. The way I heard it, Golden Eagle became so stuck-up and full of himself from being the pet of princesses that the staff took to calling him “the Duke.” The girls, delighted with the nickname, dubbed him Dookie. Three years later, Dookie was joined by a second corgi from Thelma’s kennel, Lady Jane. Lady Jane and Elizabeth—known as Lilibet to those nearest and dearest—soon became inseparable. The most adorable little book titled Our Princesses and Their Dogs came out just in time for Christmas 1936. It was a picture book full of photographs of Elizabeth and Margaret Rose frolicking with their beloved corgis and other royal dogs.
The same month of the book’s publication, the Duke of York ascended to the throne of England. When the people of England looked upon the pictures in this book, they saw a family with a keen attachment to and understanding of dogs. They knew that their king was a fine master, a good father, and a gentle man. Thanks in part to dogs, the people of England welcomed with open arms their new king, George VI.
Three years later, in 1939, a terrible war broke out between England and Germany. Enemy bombs fell throughout the land, destroying property and taking lives. As an example to their subjects, the king and queen chose to remain in London in the royal residence, Buckingham Palace. The princesses were sent off to the country, to Windsor Castle, behind whose stout stone walls they were kept safe. Watching over them were the officers of the Grenadier Guards, whose job it is to protect the royal family—and the royal corgis as well, although by now there was just one. Dookie had died of old age at the start of the war. Fortunately, Thelma found a mate for Lady Jane, and she soon gave birth to Crackers.
 
 
 
 
 

Author

Tales of a Fourth Grade Fantasy Writer
It all began in the fourth grade when my best friend, Justine and I--inspired by The Chronicles of Narnia, Curdie and the Princess, The Wonderful Journey to the Mushroom Planet, the books of E. Nesbit (and countless other works of fantasy recommended to us by our imperious rouge-cheeked librarian, Mrs. Thackeray)--embarked upon a fantasy epic of our own. We wrote our epic in multi-colored inks (Justine had gotten this nifty set of colored plastic quills for her birthday) in a series of classic black and white composition notebooks, whose white spaces we colored in so that every time we touched them, we got rainbows on our fingertips. I can’t remember the plot but I do know that it featured a cast of unicorns, elves, fairies, and an evil magician whose name, Pezlar, was inspired by our favorite candy. Our characters lived on islands that were shaped in their own likenesses; for instance, the unicorns lived on an island shaped like a unicorn head, where there was, naturally, a Cape Horn and a Beard Bay. Whenever we had writer’s block, we simply drew maps. We were writing (and drawing), not so much for posterity as to conjure a world that, we fervently hoped, would one day open its magical portals and take us in. The world shimmered with latent magic and we lived our days in a state of heightened expectation. When would the magic reveal itself?

Those Magical Oldsters
Taking our cue from the Professor in the Narnia books, Mary Poppins, and Mrs. Pigglewiggle, old people were especially magical to us. Ike Raff, the grumpy old man who owned the cigar store; Charlie Hicks, the seven-foot-tall homeless man who marched in the Memorial Day parade in a full Cherokee regalia, and even the scary Mrs. Thackeray were, we suspected, distinguished emissaries from magical lands. To their credit, they played it straight when, with burning intensity, we asked them such questions as, “Where do you really come from?” and “How did you get here?” “Did you fly, teleport, or use a traveling spell?”

Step right up to the Museum of Magic
Magical talismans were vitally important to us. We collected beach glass, horse chestnuts, antique buttons, old coins, and even a green crystal doorknob. And, yes, we had our own Museum of Magic that we set up in Justine’s side yard, which was just across the street from the beach. I say we set it up. I’m not sure we ever had any paying customers. We were raising funds so that we could buy the fabric to make long hunter-green capes with hoods. These were the outfits we planned to wear when we passed through the magical portals. We must have raised the funds somehow, because we actually stitched up the capes on my mother’s sewing machine. How proud we were of them! So you can imagine how crushed we were when we wore them into town one day and somebody asked us which 4-H troupe we belonged to.

Magical Portals
We looked everywhere for them: Mr. Raff’s cigar store (where we would later buy our Beatles fan mags), an old wooden boat house down at the beach, an abandoned rococo-baroque Victorian mansion near my house just bristling with magical possibilities.
One Friday night, before our favorite TV show, Twilight Zone, came on at 9:30, we took a candle and some matches and made a pilgrimage to the Victorian mansion. It was a cold and windy night, I recall, and when we spied a broken window off the porch, it seemed to say to us, “Trespass, please!” With lit candle, we solemnly walked from room to room, searching for the portal. When we got to the third floor landing, the candle suddenly flared up and then guttered. We screamed and tore out of that place back to my mother’s warm, safe kitchen. Magic, we concluded, was sometimes a pretty scary proposition. We steeled ourselves and determined to make a return trip to the ruined mansion. We never managed that second trip because a wrecker ball rolled in and leveled the site of our closest brush with magic. A branch of the U.S. Post Office took its place and, although we never attempted to break in (Federal Offense!), we did loiter in the foyer, searching for magical signs among the Wanted Posters and the public notices.

Adolescence Rears Its Ugly Head
Looking back on those years, I see that, for us, magic was a kind of pagan belief system. It was both an affirmation of and an escape from life. But maintaining our belief system was not always easy. It was often downright burdensome. We had our rituals to observe, and our obligations, too. (We held weekly classes for our stuffed animals in the faerie arts, complete with lesson plans and demonstration models). Our beliefs isolated us from the other kids (who already suspected we were more than a little bit tetched). There came a time when a kind of low-grade dread began to steal over us; dread of the day when, like Susan Pevense, we would wake up and want to wear lipstick and stockings. And of course, that day did dawn, slowly enough to be agonizing. It started with the Beatles. We simply redirected all that magical intensity in the direction of the Fab 4. Instead of believing in portals, we believed we would one day not only get to meet them, but get to marry them (Justine, John; me, Paul). After that, it was a just small step to wearing lipstick (well, Mary Quant lip gloss, in any case), stockings (fish net), mini skirts (tweed and veddy British) and, before we knew it, we were looking back on our days of magic with patronizing fondness.

Reader, I Wrote
When I grew up, I still wanted to write but writing for children seemed, well, childish. I determined to be a writer of Adult Books, and succeeded (on a very modest level). But what can I tell you? The lack of magic in the adult world, as much from a reader’s standpoint as a writer’s, eventually got to me. I missed the magic, and years later, here I am, drawn back to its portals. I even find myself believing again. I believe that the world in which we live, the world of consensus reality, is but one small room in a mansion full of rooms. I believe that writing and reading are two surefire ways to get access to the other rooms. And nowadays, it is my sole ambition to grow up to be one of those old people who just might be mistaken for a distinguished emissary from a magical land.
Do I fly, teleport, or cast traveling spells?
The answer to all of the above is yes! View titles by Kate Klimo
TIM JESSELL'S work has been recognized by the Society of Illustrators Annual Exhibitions, receiving the Society's Gold Medal Award. He is also the winner of AdWeek Magazine's Illustrator of the Year. His work can be seen in the bestselling series Secrets of Droon, Superhero Christmas (written by Stan Lee of Marvel Comics), and covers for the reissue of Zilpha Keatley Snyder's Newbery Honor Books. Tim has been a guest speaker to professional graphic communication groups and enjoys speaking to student groups as well. View titles by Tim Jessell