Queen Camilla has opened up about her private evening ritual with King Charles, offering a rare glimpse into her royal marriage.
In an interview given as part of BBC documentary The Book That Changed My Life, the Queen explained that she and her husband of 21 years always have a quiet moment of reading together before they have dinner each night.
“It’s like the best tonic in the world. My husband and I actually read before dinner, just sitting quietly and reading,” she said.
“He loves biographies, and PG Wodehouse. I occasionally, when I’m deep in a book, hear him roaring with laughter about something,” the Queen went on in a nod to the famous British comic novelist.
“It’s very off-putting, I can’t get back into my book, or I’ll suddenly start weeping. But it’s a lovely, quiet time. I think it would be a complete and utter tragedy if books went forever.”
Elsewhere in the 60-minute documentary, the Queen confessed to secretly reading raunchy period novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover – which was even at the centre of an obscenity trial in 1960 – as a teenager in the sixties.
“As teenagers you read a lot of romances. It was the moment of Lady Chatterley, under our pillows, reading that by torchlight. You know the minute something is forbidden, you want to get hold of it.”
The Queen pointed out that reading had provided a significant portion of her education.
“I left school quite young. In my day, women didn’t go to university, so I think reading has been most of my education,” she said.
At another point during the documentary, the Queen shared a poignant story about her father and his experience as a prisoner of war who was captured and imprisoned for two and a half years during WW11.
“In those places, there’s not much to do unless you’re plotting your escape. So he said he educated himself. He read every single book, from the Bible to the encyclopaedia, whatever was there, he just sat there all day long and read and read. And I think that’s how he survived it,” the Queen told the interviewer.
According to Camilla, her father refused to speak about that dark period, saying “you bury it all because you’ve seen such horrendous things” – but that he’d written a memoir which helped her finally understand what he’d been through.
“It was written from the heart. I mean, I cried through most of it. I found it so moving. Because if you think, I didn’t know anything about it, and reading managed to get him through it.”
The Book That Changed My Life also shared moving testimonies about the power of reading from everyday Britons such as Omar, who began devouring books while in prison as a form of mentally escaping his cell.
Another man, Ian, shared the heartbreaking story of losing his mother and finding himself completely socially isolated as he withdrew from the world.
“I used to sit with my head on the kitchen table, crying. It was such a difficult period of loneliness, of nothingness,” he said, explaining that he had begun reading in earnest and joined a book club – which saw him emerge from the darkness.
The Queen’s involvement in the documentary serves as her latest effort to encourage higher literacy rates and shift focus from screens back to books in Britain, where eight million adults struggle with even basic reading skills.
Camilla has long campaigned about the issue, having launched her Queen’s Reading Room five years ago (then called The Duchess of Cornwall’s Reading Room), which has since evolved into a massive book club involving events and charity projects.