The Peoples King by Susan Williams Page B

country of the world, under all conditions and circumstances. And, although I now speak to you as King, I am still that same man who has had that experience and whose constant effort it will be to continue to promote the well-being of his fellow-men .. , 42
    They even shared a concern about their body weight. In 1932 Wallis told her aunt that she had recovered some of her 'pep' after an operation to remove her tonsils - 'and the 4 pounds in weight have improved my disposition if not my "behind".' 43 She wrote with some satisfaction in February 1934 that, 'lam feeling very well but am quite thin not in the face but in the figure. Naturally worry over finances is not fat-making. I weigh 8 stone undressed but eat and drink as usual.' 44 Edward, too, kept track of his weight, though he was always thin and light. Right from his teenage years he had worried that he was becom­ing fat, so he ate frugally and took frequent vigorous exercise. When Edward was nineteen, Winston Churchill wrote from Balmoral Castle to his wife that
     
    He is so nice, & we have made rather friends. They are worried a little about him, as he has become so vy Spartan - rising at 6 & eating hardly anything. He requires to fall in love with a pretty cat, who will prevent him from getting too strenuous. 45
    Edward's size was a constant source of worry to his father, George V, who feared he might 'remain a sort of puny half-grown boy'. 46 He never lost his obsession with weight and exercise. For a voyage to the Far East on HMS Renown in 1921, he had a squash court specially built in the ship. He was 'mad keen' on keeping fit, wrote his equerry Bruce Ogilvy, who had to play squash with him every morning. 47 And in Wallis he had found someone with whom he could share this interest:
    I'm longing for an eanum letter Wallis . . . Please don't over eat until we can again together or I'm there to say stop or you'll be quite ill I know . . . Oh! to be alone for ages and ages and then - ages and ages. God bless WE sweetheart but I'm sure he does - he must.
    Your DAVID 48
    Edward and Wallis had both travelled to many distant and exotic parts of the world. He had visited practically all the major nations of the world except Soviet Russia, while she knew her own country from the Atlantic to the Pacific and had travelled through Europe and Asia - something unimaginable to most Western women at the time. It was not so much that women didn't go abroad between the wars. Upper-class women travelled all over the world, but for the most part they did so as a wife or as a daughter, protected by a man and by his wealth and status. Wallis, on the other hand, had often travelled alone, without much money or any status beyond that of being an American citizen. 'From the first,' wrote Edward later, 'I looked upon her as the most independent woman I had ever met.' 49 Wallis was also quite fearless. After her final separation from Win, at the age of twenty-eight, she left him in Hong Kong and journeyed to Shanghai in China. When she decided to go on to Peking, she was advised by the American Consul against travelling by rail, on the grounds that it would take her through territory made dangerous by a local war. But she went anyway:
    The train was late in getting under way. As usual, the aisles were crowded with Chinese passengers, chiefly occupied in eating oranges and spitting out the pips. Seated across from me, the only other Occidental in the carriage, was a rather plump, middle-aged man . . . several times on the way the train jerked to a violent stop; evil-faced men in shabby uniforms and armed w:ith rifles pushed into the crowded vestibules ... I assumed an air of utter indifference. Nothing ever happened; after a quick look around the soldiers disappeared. 50
    Once she had arrived in Peking, Wallis met an old friend from the USA, Katherine Rogers, who invited Wallis to stay with herself and her husband, Herman.
    Both Wallis and Edward understood the complexities of differences