My mother belonged to the generation that knew girls who had danced with men who had danced with girls who had danced with the Prince of Wales. Edward, that is, not Charles. The mystique attached to the descendants of the tightly inter-married families that once ruled Europe, most of them for the past century grandchildren of Queen Victoria, endures. A woman snapping pictures of Prince Harry at New York's Ground Zero a couple of weeks ago enthused, "You don't get to see many princes back in Omaha".

These are some memories from one who waited for an hour or so with his parents on Toronto's Lakeshore Boulevard in 1939 to see King George VI and Queen Elizabeth (later the Queen Mother) pass by and then moved north to see them at closer range as they entered Hart House. Years later, in 1973, I stood with my wife and children by the gate of Sir Joseph Flavelle's mansion on Queen's Park Crescent to hail the Queen Mum as she was driven past.. My goodness, she looked right at us and gave us that gracious wave.

Because of an absence from town I had to decline Principal Cedric Sowby's invitation to be present when Elizabeth II visited Upper Canada College. I missed that closer encounter with royalty.

And then there was my conversation with the Grand Duchess Olga. That happened at Toronto's Russian Orthodox Cathedral, then in Glen Morris Street, one Julian calendar Christmas Eve in January. I was introduced by Fr Gordon Hearn, rector of St Mary the Virgin (Anglican) parish. He was a Russophile, once a member of the Canadian force that landed at Vladivostok in 1921 to reinforce the White Russian resistance to the Leninist Reds.

The fragile woman whom I met that night was the youngest sister of Czar Nicholas II who, with his family, was massacred in 1917. Sixty of her letters to her mother and her sister during the course of the Russian Revolution are to be auctioned this week in London at the Olympia International Art and Antiques Fair. The reserve bid is $163, 500.

Olga was a nurse in Kiev when the revolution was in its early stage of bloodletting that went on until Joseph Stalin's death in 1953. She last saw her brother and the 12 year old Czarevich Alexei in May, 1916. Thereafter she lived with tragic memories of her family's fate until she died in Clarkson, Ontario.

Before I chatted briefly with the Grand Duchess that evening, I had spoken to her son, one of the Koulikovsky boys - Tikhon, I think - who worked at the Art Gallery in Eaton's-College Street. He, like his uncle the last Czar, bore striking resemblance to the (young) George V with whose picture we were all familiar and whose image was still on many of our coins. King George and Nicholas II had been cousins.

Olga had married Col. Nicholas Koulikovsky in Russia and escaped with him to exile in Denmark. In due course they came to Canada and established themselves on a small market garden farm in what is now Mississauga.

Fr Hearn often spoke about the Grand Duchess. I remember, especially, him recounting her memories of her brother's coronation in 1894. Through some terrible negligence one of the outdoor stands built to hold spectators collapsed on the day of the great event. Many people were killed. Olga remembered that some of the guests who approached the Uspensky Cathedral in the Kremlin actually had to step over dead bodies. Then, during the coronation service, the imperial chain that had been placed upon the new emperor's breast, broke and fell to the floor. Afterwards, in a crowd pressing for free food and souvenirs in Khodynka Field outside Moscow, a thousand people were trampled to death and many more injured.

His sister said that from that day the Czar had a sense of foreboding. The disastrous Russo- Japanese war of 1904, his determination to be an autocrat in spite of nagging fears that he was unequal to his responsibilities and then the fiasco of his country's participation in the First Great War sealed his fate and that of the old Russia. It was all grist for the mill of a Greek tragic dramatist.

My other knowledge of the Grand Duchess Olga came from the Reverend Llewellyn Graham of St Barnabas Church, Ottawa, "the church of the Governors- General". 'Weldy' was an irrepressible raconteur and among his stories was that of one of Olga's visits to the nation's capital. One Sunday, after she had attended a Eucharist at St Barnabas, Fr Graham and his wife were her hosts at luncheon. The rectory had had some recent 'redoing' and Margot was particularly pleased with the new drapes in the living room. The Grand Duchess, allowing that they were agreeable, went over to touch them, rubbed the fabric between her thumb and forefinger and said, "Yes. Cheap but nice".

The Grahams spent some time at St Augustine's College, Canterbury, where I got to know them. The story of the window drapes was told to other Russian emigrés who visited there. Ever afterwards, my late wife and my daughters looked at new acquisitions for one or other of our homes and said with a smile, "Cheap but nice".

I have not read Ian Vorres's 2001 biography The Last Grand Duchess but intend to do so. Meanwhile, selections from her letters will be appearing in papers and magazines. Col.

Nicholas Koulikovsky died at Clarkson in 1958. Olga may subsequently have moved into a flat in Toronto but I never heard either Hearn or Graham mention her doing so.

There is no doubt, however, that her last days were spent in poverty, perhaps with one of her two sons.

As many seniors do, Her Imperial Highness took up painting, landscapes and flowers. I saw only one of them, a memory of her family's former summer property at Livadia Palace, site of the 1945 Yalta Conference. The others, I think, did not make it to Eaton's or any other gallery. The gentle, aristocratic artist died in 1960, aged 78.