Hello, I'm Kirstie Young.

Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the Radio Broadcast.

For more information about the program, please visit bbc.co.uk-radio4.

My cast away this week is Margaret Rose.

It was an accident of birth that's given her an unparalleled view into the lives of the most famous and enigmatic family in Britain.

She explains it by saying, my mother's sister married somebody important, and that's only the start of it.

Her aunt was the queen mother. The queen is her first cousin and her friend.

In an extraordinary life, she lodged at Buckingham Palace, whilst working for MI6,

has been held captive after a coup in Bhutan, and adventureed her way around half of Africa

before becoming the queen mother's close companion during her final years.

She says of the situation she grew up in, there was never anything said to make us think we were better than anyone else, just luckier.

Now I feel rather like a species of dinosaur left behind by evolution.

That's really how you feel, is it?

I do think sometimes one does feel a bit of a dinosaur, and I find it in a way especially now because all my brothers and sisters have died.

And I am the last dinosaur of my family remaining on this earth, so it's a reasonably accurate description of what I feel like.

I also said the world you were born into is an almost vanished world of privilege.

So do you regret that world passing?

No, I mean the point was that when one was growing up, they didn't seem remotely privileged.

I mean my parents were both mad keen gardeners, and were perpetually upside down in a flower bed,

wielding or doing something, you know.

And I was a youngest by a very long way, so I had a rally in a way quite a lonely childhood,

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