A dazzle of gold and a blaze of colours _ that's your first impression of the Grand Palace as you come down the avenue of ugly dull buildings. It is a splendid mass of pagodas, towers, halls and chapels with triple roofs ending in flourishes of serpents' tails. The temple bells glint from the eaves below roofs covered with blue and orange, green and yellow tiles. The buildings look like blown up toys. The black spires seem remote and unreal as fairy tales and dreams. High white walls surround the city for it is indeed a little city of its own.
"When I was about nine years old I was taken to the cremation of the Crown Prince and there I saw Princess Suddhadibya, who was very beautiful, and I developed a crush on her. She was one of the King's daughters and I was determined to go and live with her but I didn't until three years later after my tonsure ceremony. This is the cutting of the topknot at the age of puberty for boys and girls. When children were small their heads were shaved and only a little tuft of hair was left on top and tied into a knot and fixed with a pretty pin. The topknot was cut when the child was 11 or 12.
"My tonsure ceremony was quite grand because the King cut my topknot. There were about five or six of us all done on the same day. We were beautifully dressed for it _ gold brocade, gold and diamond necklaces, bracelets, anklets and a jewelled decoration round the topknot. The jewels were so heavy they had to carry me. I couldn't move. I felt absolutely gorgeous.
"Before I went into the Palace I had to go to school. The school was under the supervision of the Department of Education. This was at the time of the modernisation of our country. It was a very new thing. My father was what would now be the Minister of the Interior. The school was run by three English women who were helped by three Siamese girls.
The Englishwomen were brought out by the department and most of them married well here. They married the many foreign advisers from Europe and America who were nearly all bachelors in those days. Queen Saovabha herself chose the Siamese teachers and sent them to study in England. They were all very intelligent but they were people of no consequence. It was unheard of in those days for a girl of good family to go abroad to study. It was ruinous for a family's reputation. It was as shameful for a family as a daughter going on the stage in the days of Queen Victoria. Girls in those days stayed at home and suitable marriages were arranged for them.
''Life in the Palace was very dull. APART from the crazes we had for bicycling and photography and playing croquet, there wasn't much amusement. Physically it was very uncomfortable. There were thousands of women and children inside the palace, living in hundreds of buildings of various sizes made of brick or wood according to the importance and standing of the owner of the house. There was no running water or sewage system.
The King died in 1910 at one of the palaces in the park. He was nursed by Queen Saovabha and his favourites. We were all heartbroken and shaved our heads and went into mourning. White was the colour of mourning in those days.
''It was very sad in the Palace after King Chulalongkorn's death because his successor was unmarried and would not live Inside. He preferred his palace in the park, so for us Inside, it was like a world without a sun. Life was all monotony. No King's meals to prepare; nothing to do for him. We, who had talked about what the King did, what he said, what he liked and what he disliked, now had nothing to talk about.