Seventy years – how did she do it?

6th February 1952- 8th September 2022. More than seventy years, how did the late Queen put up with it for seventy years?

Some fifteen years ago, I had the privilege of spending ten days at Saint George’s House within the walls of Windsor Castle. It was a time filled with a sense of history, a sense of beauty, and a sense of wonder at how someone could live their entire life in public gaze.

Saint George’s Chapel, the cathedral-sized place of worship in the castle with its own bishop as dean, is a place steeped in history, tracing itself back to the 13th Century.  It is filled with the graves of English monarchs, including the grave of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth and their daughter Princess Margaret.

At the time, I wondered if the Queen of England, who was then over 80, stood at the grave of her parents and sister and remembered happier times. I wondered if there was a moment for saying a few words and for shedding a tear, I wondered if she was ever given space and peace and quiet?

I have never understood the relationship of the English with the Royal Family. On the one hand there are countless people who would declare themselves avid supporters of the monarchy.  Ob the other hand, it is often those self same people who seize upon every piece of gossip and rumour carried by the vile tabloid press.

If people did not read such stories, if they did not buy the newspapers and magazines that carried nothing more than idle gossip, the press would very quickly cease to run them, yet the slightest story sparks flurries of excitement on the front pages and on the television and radio news.

I often wondered if the Queen ever had recourse to the press complaints body, or to the broadcasting standards authorities, over the stories that are distortions and the others that are simply lies?

It is confusing, if you respect someone, then you respect their right to privacy and their right to having their own inner life. You can’t claim to respect someone if you splash every poisonous piece of malign speculation all over the newspapers.

To have remained in office for seventy years must have demanded incredible powers of perseverance. If I had been in the Queen’s place, I would have called it a day a long time ago. I would have taken my family money and told the State that they could take what was theirs and I would have gone to live in Paris, where they at least have respect for style.

Seventy  years, how did she do it?

Posted in This sceptred isle | Leave a comment

Earliest memories

A friend suggested writing a memoir. ‘What of?’ I asked.

More important than memoirs are memories. Memoirs might, or might not, interest someone else (mine would fall into the latter category). Memories, on the other hand, can be deeply important to the person recalling them.

The Internet is a boon for the business of memories, it allows cross-schecking. It allows the possibility of verification of what year something may have happened, and sometimes more precise dating.

So an online search was able to tell me that the time I recall stopping to allow a train to pass at level crossing gates in Martock must have been when I was three or four years old.  The station closed to passengers in June 1964 and to goods the following month, although, before its complete closure, the line was used for training in the winter of 1964-65.

From a similar time comes a memory of a moment standing on an empty platform with my mother at Langport West station, which was on the line from Yeovil to taunton that passed through Martock.  It has to date from before 13th June 1964, because that was the Saturday on which the last passenger train departed from the station. My mother tells me that we were going to Taunton to visit my father who was in hospital. The oldest I could have been, in that clearly recalled scene, was three years and eight months old.

Why do steam trains loom so large in those early memories? Perhaps to a small boy, they had often seemed to be fearful machines, prone to making loud noise, or sudden bursts of steam.

From that steam train era comes a recollection of a day trip to Weymouth. There was a  train that went along the line that went through the streets on its way to the harbour, from where ferries left for France and the Channel Islands, and there was a fire engine, its bell ringing loudly, which passed us on its way to a call in the town.

My mother’s recollections go back to when she was even younger.

Asking my late grandfather about them seeing an airship, my grandfather had responded, ‘How do you remember that, Ruby, you were only two? I had taken you out to Aller with me on the bicycle. On the way back, we were at Whitehill when it went over. I stopped and we stood and watched it for a long time.’

It was a story that was often questioned. Was it imagined? Was it a retrojection of a later moment? One local telling of it by a man in our village had embellished the story to the point where it was said that Adolf Hitler had flown over.

It was the possibility of an online search that had offered the possibility of verifying the memory. The British airship experience had ended in the early 1930s, the famous German airship the Hindenburg had ended in flames in 1937. How then could there possibly have been an airship over Somerset in 1939?

A search of the web confirmed that a German  Zeppelin had flown over Yeovil before the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. Reconnaissance pictures it had taken included photographs of the Westland aircraft factory.

Such memories have a deeper fascination than mere memoirs.

 

Posted in Unreliable memories | Leave a comment

Sucked into a black hole

I like the word ‘vortex,’ it has about it much more a sense of excitement than is conveyed by its definition in the realm of physics.

A friend attended Sussex University at the end of the 1970s. They were times when access to the airwaves was something novel and universities would have their own radio stations. On a Friday night at Sussex, the programme broadcast was called Charles Suet’s Total Music Vortex, or something similar. (The broadcaster’s name probably wasn’t ‘Suet,’ although I think if I was using ‘Suet’ as an assumed name, I would have become ‘Atora Suet’).  ‘Vortex’ suggested that the music would draw you into it. To those who remembered Helen Reddy’s song Angie Baby, in which the miscreant is drawn into the radio, there was almost a touch of the sinister in the idea of a music vortex.

Perhaps vortices are much more common than is imagined, psychological vortices which pull down those who stray too near without the momentum to carry them clear.

Bookshops seem to be vortices for some of us.

Having bought twelve or so books for summer reading, I had vowed that there would be no more books bought until they had been read. I determinedly put them in a pile on the dresser as a reminder that there was no further need to buy anything until I had made inroads into those I had bought, which range from Che Guevara’s Motorcycle Diaries to A.C. Grayling’s History of Philosophy. (I read two chapters of the Motorcycle Diaries, I think I had subsconsciously imagined something with the pace of Jack Kerouac and found something instead that seems very pedestrian. Grayling’s tome has not yet been opened).

Walking through the city centre on Wednesday afternoon, I deliberately avoided streets where there were bookshops. However, to reach the stop for the No 7 bus, I had to walk down Dawson Street and there one passes the greatest vortex of them all, Hodges Figgis. Any book lover would find it difficult to pass a shop with four floors of books.

I promised myself that I would only browse, but in the academic section there was a box of books at reduced prices. One book caught my eye and then I noticed it had been reduced from €35 to €5, too good to be left behind. Of course, it would have seemed mean to have just bought a book from the reduced price section, so I found another book to make the bill look more respectable.

Having paid the pleasant young American who was at the checkout, I was released from the vortex, promising myself that there would be no more books bought for a long time.

Posted in The stuff of daily life | 2 Comments

Educational instruments

My nephews return to school next week. The all too short English summer holidays are drawing to a close.

Having attempted on various occasions to borrow from them things like a rubber or a pencil sharpener, I realise that teenage boys have not changed. The only difference is the selection of equipment that might be lost or put to other uses seems to have multiplied.

Supermarkets have had an abundant array of pens and pencils, assorted accessories, sophisticated calculators, highlighter pens and erasers. When did buying things for school  become a matter of deciding between so many and varied options?  One could spend the best part of a good deal of money and still go away feeling there was more that could have been bought.

One thing always brings a giggle – a Helix Oxford Folding Ruler.

There was a plentiful supply of folding rulers in schooldays, their chief drawback was that they did not fold back.

Plastic rulers were appearing, but the standard classroom ruler was wooden. On one side, there were twelve inches marked in whole and quarter-inches, on the reverse, thirty centimetres marked in centimetres and millimetres.

Rulers were not much used for mathematical purposes: they were for drawing lines, if such were necessary. They were for flicking screwed- up balls of paper across the classroom. Or they were for or enacting battle scenes from Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers.

The soft wood from which they were manufactured allowed one to easily engrave them with the point of a pair of compasses, or to write the names of miscellaneous football clubs, pop groups, or girlfriends, in different coloured ink.

It was a rare ruler that resembled the condition in which it was purchased. The folding of one’s own ruler could be a mark of frustration; the folding of someone else’s ruler was generally a mark of annoyance. Having a ruler reduced to half of its former size was rarely a problem; lines in exercise books could still be drawn with what remained.

The shop shelf space required to supply an average schoolboy of the 1970s with the necessary equipment for his education would have been fairly limited. Along with the ruler there would have been a Platignum cartridge pen, the nib of which would have been bent and much of the contents of the cartridges would have appeared as blots on the page. Pencils would have been chewed and sharpened to stubs. A tin of mathematical instruments would have included a pair of compasses, a set square and a protractor. If the ruler was in too bad a state for drawing lines, the set square would suffice, and, in its absence, the straight edge of the protractor might have been used. Erasers were invariably in short supply, probably because they had been employed as missiles in classroom battles while the teacher was writing on the board. Of course, there were the options of having felt tip pens and coloured pencils, but colour and beauty were considered too ‘feminine’ to be the product of a boy’s pencil case.

Judging from my own classrooms, things have not changed.

 

Posted in Unreliable memories | 2 Comments

Cold borrowers?

I like scarves.

At school, I wear a shirt, tie, sports jacket, and trousers. In summer, the sports jacket is linen, in winter it is tweed. In autumn and winter, I wear a scarf.

I like scarves. I like long scarves. I like the sort of scarves that I can fold in half and then put the two ends through the loop and pull snugly around my neck. Or the sort of scarf that I can loop around my neck and have the two ends still at waist length.

It was such a preference that caused me disappointment in the spring – one of my favourite scarves was lost.

One of the students in school noticed it was no longer among the half a dozen that I wear. ‘Where’s the stripey scarf you used to wear, sir?’

‘I don’t know,’ I replied. ‘I must have left it in one of those classrooms.’

Normally, going into a warm room, I would take off my scarf and hang it over the back of the chair at the teacher’s desk. I rarely sit down during a lesson, so it is not in the way.

There had been three or four times previously when I had returned to rooms to recover scarves, (a small fraction of the times that I had returned to recover my external hard drive which contains my life’s work and without which I would be lost).

The loss of the scarf was annoying. I checked each of the rooms in which I had taught, I checked every corner of the staff room, I checked rooms into which I had not been, lest someone had picked it up to return it and had then put it down again.

The scarf was nowhere to be found. I concluded that either someone had taken it, or, more likely, it had been thrown away.

There were thoughts about buying a replacement. The cost of energy might mean scarves become indoor as well as outdoor wear.

Returning from a summer in England on Tuesday evening, I began unpacking my bags.

At the bottom of the chest of drawers, there is a drawer into which I put stuff that is rarely, if ever, worn. I opened it to throw in a couple of pairs of shorts not worn in years that had been lying in a wardrobe in Somerset. There was a moment of delight – there, neatly folded, was my scarf.

How the scarf came to be in a drawer of rarely worn garments, I have no idea. I have no recall of putting it there. All of my scarves are together in a cupboard, there is no reason why I would have opened the drawer and put the scarf in it.

Recalling the children’s story,  my father would have said it was the borrowers.

Posted in Uncategorised | 4 Comments