The Queen has revealed how she read Lady Chatterley's Lover "by torchlight" as a teenager as she opened up about the education she received from books. And Camilla, who left school aged 16, shared how the King distracts her from her books by "roaring with laughter” as they read together before dinner.
"My husband and I actually read before dinner. We just like sitting quietly and reading. He loves biographies and PG Wodehouse," she says in a new BBC documentary. "I occasionally, when I'm deep in a book, hear him roaring with laughter about something. 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.”
Reflecting on how she was introduced to the joys of reading by her father Major Bruce Shand, who sought solace in books during his time as a prisoner of war, she adds: "I left school quite young because in my day women didn't go to universities. So I think reading has been most of my education. We must have been very, very young when my father started reading to us. I think that's where my love of reading came from. We were transported into all sorts of other worlds."
© CREDIT LINE:BBC / Blink FilmsShe cites classics from Treasure Island and Peter Pan to The Scarlet Pimpernel and A Tale of Two Cities, adding: "And then as teenagers, you read a lot of romances. It was the moment of Lady Chatterley under our pillows reading that by torchlight.
"The minute something's forbidden, you want to get hold of it," she says. "You learn so much about people, about life. I think people who don't read miss out so much.”
The classic novel by D.H. Lawrence tells the story of an upper class married woman who has an affair with the gamekeeper. It was the subject of an obscenity trial when it was first published in full in 1960.
An 'unusual' book club meeting
In The Book That Changed My Life, the Queen is joined for tea at Clarence House by four unlikely book club companions – former prisoner Omar Mentesh, truck driver Peter Lloyd, roadside cafe owner Sarah Heward and Ian Kirby, who was too scared to leave home after an assault – to hear how the act of reading helped them when they needed it most. In a message shared ahead of the film's release, the Queen described it as "one of the most unusual book club meetings I have ever attended."
Omar, who is seen returning to Feltham Young Offenders Institution, where he first picked up a book aged 15. He had left school at 13, after an accident on a railway line at the age of eight left him struggling to keep up with his classmates.
He now helps to rehabilitate prisoners through his company Anabranch and described the Queen as "so authentic” and their time together as "so cool, so genuinely amazing." He tells HELLO!: "I thought she was really sincere in what she's doing. It was just an amazing experience."
© CREDIT LINE:BBC / Blink FilmsFive years since the launch of The Queen's Reading Room, which now reaches 12 million people across 184 countries, Camilla says: "We've done this research with the neuroscientists, who just said that 10 minutes reading a day reduces stress by 20%. You know, it's a huge amount, because you're not thinking of yourself, when you're reading, you can immerse yourself in other people's lives, and that does relieve the stress.
"I think it would be a complete and utter tragedy if books went forever. It's part of our heritage, if there's no reading, personally, I think we might as well all give up because I don't think we'd even be human any longer.”
The Book That Changed My Life is on BBC2 at 9pm on Wednesday 14 October and on BBC iPlayer.
