All in The Family

Every family has its little secrets, and the British royal family seems to have at least its share. Last week the Sun newspaper of London disclosed that two first cousins of Queen Elizabeth's, who were listed as having died long ago in Burke's Peerage, a leading directory of the British aristocracy, actually spent decades as patients in a Surrey mental hospital; one still survives there. Nerissa and Katherine Bowes-Lyon, two of the five children of the Queen Mother's brother John, and both severely retarded, were admitted to the Royal Earlswood hospital in 1941. Though Burke's lists the two women as having died in 1940 and 1961, respectively, Nerissa died only last year, at the age of 67, and Katherine, 60, lives in a seven-bed ward at the hospital.

Was the condition of the royal cousins hushed up? If so, it may have been the work of a former Countess of Strathmore, a paternal aunt, who periodically updated the family's entry in Burke's. Buckingham Palace remained tight- lipped on the matter. But Elizabeth Norman, head of the hospital's auxiliary, said she wrote to the Queen Mother about her nieces in 1982 and received a reply. In it, said Norman, the Queen Mum expressed surprise at the news that the two were still alive, and sent money to buy them gifts.