By Wee Wifie

So, the queen as a young girl has been caught on camera giving a Nazi salute! Once again, due to her high ranking in society, she has stolen a march on me. I grew up in a street of tenements and there must have been dozens of us using it, and the communal gardens, as our playground. We had no televisions and I doubt of any of us ever read a newspaper; our only source of news was on a visit to the cinema.

In those days we had two films to watch, one a B-rated which the adults rarely wanted to see but we wanted our money's worth; a comic strip and what we termed a 'boring' newsreel that had to be endured. Then there was Odeon's Saturday Morning Club when we followed the adventures of the cowboys and indians, cops and robbers, cute and extremely clever animals, as well as a comic strip. We were always left with a cliff-hanger, sometimes literally, when our heroes and heroines were caught in a perilous situation. Would they survive? We knew they would but pretended we didn't and all the way home we would re-enact our version of the final result. For the next week we would be cowboys and indians and mercilessly shoot each other down. You could die as an indian and rise again as a cowboy, depending on who you faced. All you had to remember were the all important words, 'Paleface speaks with forked tongue' or 'Hi-ho, Tonto' and you were back in the game. The same with cops and robbers; 'You're nicked', 'Hands up' or 'You dirty rotter'.

Then the cinema's newsreels took on a different aspect and there were columns of dark-clad Germans goose-stepping along, right arms outstretched and chanting in guttural tones. Hitler, Goering and Goebbels appeared. We knew they were 'bad men' and our army had to beat them. We had no conception of any atrocities, apart from the fact that they had invaded a country called Poland and we didn't want that to happen to Britain. It was inevitable, however, that we adopted the goose-step and a Nazi salute. It was the custom to place your left index finger along the top of your upper lip to simulate Hitler's moustache and chant 'Sieg Heil' and 'Achtung', the only German words we knew, much to the amusement of our watching parents. My brother, always one to take things to extremes, started using coal to mark a black moustache under his nose, leading him to his nickname of 'Fritz', the only German name we knew. This name stuck with him for the rest of his life. However, nobody ever accused any of us of being Nazi sympathisers. We were children, copying those we saw on our big screens. The phase passed and we moved on long before the full force of the Nazi atrocities came to light.

Whether or not the Queen's uncle was manipulating her is another matter. She was a child then, as I was, goose-stepping along behind my brother and pals. I wonder just how many others remember doing the same?