Queen Camilla opens up about why reading has been most of her education.
Queen Camilla says reading has been “most of my education,” and she is sharing how books shaped her in a new BBC documentary.
Camilla left school at 16, a memory she explained further, saying, “In my day women didn’t go to universities.”
She now credits her father, Major Bruce Shand, who found comfort in books as a prisoner of war and read to his children when they were very young. “We were transported into all sorts of other worlds,” she said.
She named Treasure Island, Peter Pan, The Scarlet Pimpernel and A Tale of Two Cities among her early favorites.
As a teenager, she said, she moved on to romances, including Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which she and her friends read under their pillows by torchlight. “The minute something’s forbidden, you want to get hold of it,” she said. D.H. Lawrence’s novel, about a married upper-class woman who has an affair with a gamekeeper, was the subject of an obscenity trial when it was first published in full in 1960.
These days, she and the King read together before dinner. “He loves biographies and PG Wodehouse,” she said. She admitted he can be distracting. “I occasionally, when I’m deep in a book, hear him roaring with laughter about something. It’s very off-putting.”
The documentary, The Book That Changed My Life shows Camilla hosting tea at Clarence House for four guests: Omar Mentesh, a former prisoner, truck driver Peter Lloyd, cafe owner Sarah Heward and Ian Kirby, who was afraid to leave home after an assault. They talk about how reading helped them. Camilla called it “one of the most unusual book club meetings I have ever attended.”
Camilla also spoke about The Queen’s Reading Room, launched five years ago, which she said now reaches 12 million people in 184 countries. She said research shows 10 minutes of reading a day cuts stress by 20%. Losing books, she said, would be “a complete and utter tragedy.”
The film airs on BBC2 at 9 p.m. on Wednesday, October 14, and on BBC iPlayer.
