As any pigeon knows, things happen when you turn your back. Like the farmer intent on ploughing while Icarus falls from the sky in Breughel’s famous painting.
I’d switched on the television to see the news at midday last Thursday, keen to follow the debate on the energy price cap. Instead, the presenters were talking about the Queen’s state of health in the light of a cryptic message from her doctors at Balmoral. It was the same at 12.30pm and then again at 1pm. I tried some other channels, but there was no other news to be had. What exactly was going on?
It was nearer 6pm when I tried again. Same story. Had it been going on all afternoon? Huw Edwards and Nicholas Witchell, in their black suits and ties, still filling the airwaves with comment and speculation. The Queen’s family had been summoned to Balmoral. Faces glimpsed through a car window looked grim. Crowds were gathering outside Buckingham Palace.
My husband came in from town. Any news? He was hungry. What about dinner? At nearly 6.30pm I got impatient with the endless repetition onscreen and went into the kitchen. No sooner had I turned my back than Huw Edwards seemed to say the Queen had died. I turned. What? Had I heard correctly? Huw Edwards repeated the news.
In shock and disbelief, I found myself welling up. It has that effect, the news of a death, the sight of a coffin. I had never actually met her, so it wasn’t so much a tear for the Queen personally as a tripwire reminder of our common, inevitable mortality.
The reign of Queen Elizabeth II has been in the background almost all my life, since the post-war years of rationing, social deference and stay-at-home mums, unrecognisable today. I never met her personally. She remained a distant, fairytale person, glamorous for the time in her endlessly changing colourful outfits and those hats, visiting her ‘realms’ throughout the world as old empire morphed into new Commonwealth. There were those walkabouts with Prince Philip stoically at her side or a pace or two behind, or waving from open-topped cars passing at speed, or launching ships with a ‘May God bless her and all who sail in her’.
How had this happened so quickly? Tuesday she was inviting the new Prime Minister to form a government. Thursday afternoon she was dead. Now Prince Charles was King. The second Elizabethan Age was over and everyone was very sad and sombre.
*****
One of the most significant memories of my childhood was of the Queen’s Coronation. I was five in 1952 when King George VI died, the same year as my beloved Highland grandfather. In my childish mind, I imagined them meeting up in Heaven, perhaps having breakfast together. I was too young, too strictly brought up, to imagine them going off to the pub, assuming Heaven might actually have one. The following year was the Coronation. We didn’t have a television â my father felt that watching television simply rotted the brain â so the mother of a schoolfriend invited me to watch it with her family and some friends on their new television with its small black and white screen.
I was always shy among strangers, but I curled up in the corner of a sofa and was completely absorbed. It was the first time a Coronation had been televised, Richard Dimbleby doing the commentary with his trademark velvet emollience. It was raining in London, much as it did the day she died. But it was still all rather awesome: the parade of military from around the empire, the baroque gold coach and horses setting off from Buckingham Palace, the foreign dignitaries. Queen Saloté of Tonga was memorably charismatic. Anyone remember her, riding in an open coach, wreathed in smiles, while the rain poured relentlessly down?
Everyone assembled in the Abbey wore their finest: the men in white knee breeches beneath their red and ermine robes, the ladies in long white or ivory silk or satin dresses. Not only was the military regimented to the last detail, but also the maids of honour carrying the Queen’s train under the direction of a severe-looking Duchess of Devonshire. Even the page boys attending the men wore long sub-military jackets in various colours and, like their elders, white knee breeches. They might have emerged fully formed from an 18th-century time capsule.
I remember being puzzled by the mystique of the Anointing, which I found strangely disturbing. What could be going on under that canopy in public that we couldn’t see? Then coronets were retrieved from bags and under seats and placed on heads to raucous cries of Vivat Regina. It was also strange to see important gentlemen of the realm, like the Duke of Edinburgh, kneeling in front of her and promising to be her liegemen of life and limb against all manner of folk. And there was Prince Charles, not much younger than myself, leaning over the gallery rail beside his grandmother, clearly absorbed in processing what was going on in his own small way.
Unfortunately, when I uncurled myself I’m afraid to say I had wet myself. The service had lasted so long and in a strange house I had been too embarrassed to ask where the bathroom was. My friend’s mother was very kind and understanding, but the memory still haunts me.
Sorry, Ma’am. I was only six. These things happen at six sometimes, though I’m sure you would have spoken up sooner than be caught short. Clearly I’m not the stuff of which monarchs are made.
Later, the school bussed us into a cinema in Falkirk to see the technicolor version of the Coronation. We lived in Polmont then, not Edinburgh, so Falkirk was our nearest big town. At school we were given souvenir mugs. The teacher called out our names from her tall desk and we had to respond individually. The girls had to curtsy and the boys bow or salute, I can’t remember which. That was how we were expected to behave back then. However, a boy called Jack Dawson made me giggle and we both had to stand together in shame in front of the class while the mug distribution continued.
Sorry again, Ma’am. I’m sure you would have been more disciplined and dutiful, even at six. I still have my souvenir mug, but a miniature replica of the gold coach and horses we also got has long disappeared.
*****
As I write, I’ve been following the televised images of the cortège on its way south to Holyrood House in Edinburgh. I’m rather glad she died at Balmoral in Scotland, for which she had a deep and abiding affection. As her coffin passes through the villages along what has become known as Royal Deeside on a pleasant dry morning, it shines a light on us when at times we feel snubbed, denigrated and reduced to the ranks by recent Westminster governments. Even Ian Hislop, who usually makes me laugh, finds us boring.
I rather look forward to seeing how King Charles does, strange as it seems to be referring to him in that way. He’s been Prince Charles for so long. Of course, he’s rich and privileged, but he hasn’t wasted his time as some of his predecessors did, and his charitable trusts have done a great deal of good work over the years. He has his flaws and hasn’t had his troubles to seek. His disastrous first marriage to Lady Diana Spencer was a tragic narrative of two needy but woefully mismatched individuals. Happier now, he seems a decent sort, likeable and reflective. As for his gaffes as a youngster, does anyone even remember the cherry brandy episode?
I think he’ll do all right, Ma’am. But who knows? ‘Events, dear boy, events,’ as you probably remember Harold Macmillan is once alleged to have ominously said.
Gillean Somerville-Arjat is a writer and critic based in Edinburgh