1953 in My Father's House XVII
The Best Things in Life are Free – Unless We are Speaking of a Coronation!
On the last afternoon of the holiday my father and I took the Cocker Spaniel up to Devil’s Dyke. It was a breezy day with a sharp north wind and the wind sent the puppy wild. She careered around in all directions. My father let her off the lead, then we had what he described as ‘a devil of a difficulty’ getting her back, the Dyke’s very own devil seemed to have got into her. She ran from one cluster of walkers to another, playing with every dog she encountered on the way, but each time we approached she gave us the chase, getting further and further away. We decided to turn our backs on her and walk towards the car. Every now and again I peeked round to check, and yes, she was following us. When she came close enough, my father made a lunge for her. If I strain for it, I can still hear his satisfied chuckle in my head now. After that the pup trotted beside us on the lead.
The Downs were all around us, softer contours, baby mountains compared to my Table Mountain but all those varied greens of spring melting into one another with the flashes of white where the chalk stood out. It was then my father said to me, ‘I don’t think you can find a landscape to beat this anywhere in the world. You know, Jo, I travel, I have advantages now that I didn’t have when I was younger, but the best things in life are free, remember that.’
On the way back, sitting on the plush leather seats of his Jaguar with the puppy lying exhausted on my feet, I did think about it. It seemed an odd thing for him to say, living as he did so luxuriously, with Mrs Ash, Fay and Griff to look after him. Yet he appeared not to see any contradiction: he was quite sincere.
Then a few days later, back at Badminton one early evening before the supper bell went, I was sitting on the mound in the Rough Patch with my friend Belinda. The ground had finally dried out. We were exchanging holiday news, those things you don’t tell in a rush, and only to people you trust. She was telling me about a row her parents had had, how her father had stormed off and not come back till late in the night, and that this was the first time she’d known such an occurrence. I was building up to telling her about the man who had dragged me inside his house when I’d been canvassing, still not sure if I would because I didn’t want her to think my father irresponsible, but pretty sure she was someone whose response I could trust, who wouldn’t make a joke of it, or say too much.
I was listening to her talk and at the same time looking around. How surprising it was that from all that earlier mud, grasses were springing up. The dead leaves were mostly blown away. There were clumps of a mauve bell-shaped flower that I would ask Belinda to identify for me. The trees were putting out fresh green leaves, and for once my whole body wasn’t tight with the cold, and my father’s words came to me.
Ahead, I was to discover that alongside his sumptuous lifestyle, he biked for miles at the weekends when there wasn’t an election to fight, took dips in the sea in his lunch hour through the summer, swam between the two piers on New Year’s Eve, and was an inveterate walker. Such a curious mix he was and yet I sort of understood it. Whether it’s passed on or what, I’ve found in my life, too, that despite the opportunities I’ve had, it’s often been the free moments in nature that have given me my most profound pleasures: a ten miles walk on the Downs with a friend, stopping for a lunch of cheese and an apple just that, and how delicious the apple and cheese tasted! Dancing in the rain with my daughter in her childhood, the scent of a bluebell wood, swimming over to the island from the lake on Cortes, B.C., or, simply being on the mound that dusk with Belinda – with the clumps of those delicate mauve flowers opening whose name I didn’t yet know.
This second term at Badminton wasn’t as hard as the first. I knew the ropes, and the coaching had helped with my academic work, though I remained frequently distracted in class. There were only five weeks to go till we returned to our homes, and the excitement of Queen Elizabeth’s Coronation lay ahead. After the break, I was told, there would be daily swimming.
The hamster shed was a hive of activity. Mrs Sanderson seemed to have relaxed her stance on keeping them as pets. Several other girls had brought one back this term. From being a secretive hamster group of two, we were now in the open. Five more girls had hamsters in the shed. We became something of a group, the ‘hamster girls’ with Belinda and I retaining our seniority as the most experienced. Best of all, my gut sense had been right about Mustard, she was pregnant and we were eagerly waiting for the babies to appear.
The dorm rules were still arduous and in today’s light, excessive. Those hospital corners to the bed sheets were regimentally checked. Only five hairs were allowed to remain in a hairbrush on hair-wash days. The hair-washing was done by the matron who at the same time roughly examined our tender heads for nits. We bathed three times a week; on the alternate days we strip-washed at the basin. There was little privacy. We had to go to the bathroom in pairs, just as we walked to church in pairs. Five ornaments next to our bedside chests were the only mementoes of home allowed, and woe betide anyone who brought an extra photo or keepsake! Punctuality after an outing (something I had to impress on Uncle Harold) was an absolute must. On went the list of Dos and Don’ts. They were legion.
But the urge to cry at night was definitely lessening. Except for one or two unfortunate girls, most of us had settled into the system because it was that or run away, or do something so frightful you got yourself expelled. I’d tried to raise the alarm in my first term that I was drowning, sending some message to my parents with my ‘bad’ behaviour, but that hadn’t worked. And now I found that I wasn’t drowning after all. I was making do, like most of the others, though I wouldn’t have wished it on my own daughter when the time came to choose a school for her. Having friends helped, that and the hamsters, and playing the piano, all were great balm for those of us who weren’t sporty. Plus the piles of books I consumed during my two and a half years at Badminton Junior School.
Meanwhile, Daddy wrote that he had won his seat back on the council election, had taken four seats from the Conservative and been returned with an increased number of votes. He said, ‘So it was worth all our hard work, Jo.’ I expect the ‘our’ referred to those volunteers in his team, but I took it to include my effort too. My class didn’t think it was much, it was only a council election after all, but I went around with a grin on my face for days.
Daddy was more chatty in his letters, now. He told me that The Alliance were busy planning a banquet dinner in the Royal Pavilion, ‘very swish’, to celebrate their achievement that personal accounts had topped the £50,000 mark. Business was so brisk thanks to the present spurt in house-building, he wrote, that Alliance were moving over to an American punch card system. He detailed the arrangements he was making for him and Marco and me and many others from The Alliance and elsewhere to watch the Coronation procession from a flat roof of his recently acquired Park Lane offices. Everyone at school was counting the days off, this term.
Mummy also continued writing. Her letters too were full of plans that affected my spirits. She wrote that she had decided she and my brother and sister would come back to England on a boat that would dock in Venice. They would bring the old Chevrolet on the boat and then motor down leisurely through Italy and France in time to meet Daddy and me at the beginning of the summer holidays. She said something like ‘and then we’ll all be reunited.’ I hung onto those words. They had such a fine ring to them. The more she wrote about her plans, the nearer the event seemed. I began to miss her again, almost ferociously, as the time for us to be reunited began bit by bit to creep into my dreams and fantasies. I made a chart of the days to the 3rd of August, still some months away, and ticked them off.
Yet a lot was to happen first. I didn’t think about the summer for stretches of time, then remembered again and ticked off a whole lot of days together.
The weeks rushed by and before long I was on the train with the others heading for Paddington with Mustard in her cage on the carriage floor. But not Jaggi: he’d got flu or something and was too ill. He wasn’t eating and didn’t get up and run around anymore. Miss Sanderson persuaded the school doctor to come and look at him. (That was strangely kind of her on behalf of a hamster and I wondered if Daddy had put in a word on behalf of his worried daughter.) The doctor gave Jaggi some medicine. I don’t know what it was but he said with this medicine, lots of water and rest Jaggi may recover; so I had to leave him at school to be looked after which was worrisome. Mustard’s babies were now filling those empty cages of the girls who’d been expecting them. I was triumphant on that score: I’d kept my promise! And now, was I ever looking forward to seeing Marco again and Daddy, and being part of the celebrations.
*
It was THE day. Rain threatened for later. Weather that morning was pretty mixed but no-one around me seemed to be minding. All those people I saw on the television crowding the streets, many of whom had apparently arrived in London the night before and had slept out in order to get the best possible view of the processions were beaming away at the camera, waving their flags. And it was only 7.30 am!
Daddy and I had come up from Brighton the night before too. The Alliance offices on the corner of Curzon Street and Park Lane had a magnificent view from its flat roof. On the second to top floor there had been planning permission for two flats but Daddy had squeezed in a third (illegal one) which consisted of one room overlooking the front of the building and a doll-sized kitchen and bathroom. The place delighted me, especially the secret entry, cut into the wall and easily overlooked. There was a sofa that made up into a double bed, and either a camp bed had been squeezed in beside it, or I had slept in the bed with my father, but quite chastely.
Now it was morning and we were having breakfast. I was wild with excitement and eager for Marco to join us; he had spent the night before with his mother, Mary. Breakfast was brought down from the flat on the floor above which was occupied by the caretakers, Mr and Mrs Allen: lovely people who I’ve had a lifetime’s affection for. They adored my father, nothing was too much trouble for him. Mr Allen informed me on that first occasion that ‘There’s no-one like Mr Cohen. All the others, they speak to you like they are superior, Miss. Not your father. He talks to you one-to-one, direct. And he remembers things about you, he’s interested. The others couldn’t care a toss!’ Mrs Allen was of the same opinion. She was a sharp, well-dressed woman, with a wicked sense of humour. They had no children of their own and with a lot less reserve than Mrs Ash and Fay, took me into their hearts as if I had been a favourite young relative.
There was an inside staircase from their flat to ours. At 8am Daddy and I heard a knock on the door; in came Mrs Allen with a tray piled high with baked goods, strawberry jam, yogurt and prunes, Allbran for my father, fresh orange juice, wedges of brown toast in a silver rack, and a boiled egg each. And of course The Times and the Manchester Guardian and the Express, all of which he devoured for the next half hour.
I was too excited to eat much. I told Mrs Allen I would save the egg for lunch which made her laugh because she said there would be a banquet of food for later upstairs.
‘You won’t be wanting this egg, Miss Jo.’
But surviving boarding school and separation was bringing out a certain rigidness in my character, a need for routines and to know where I was. (And perhaps to be in control of the limited areas of my life where I had an option). I insisted that I would prefer that egg over any banquet and please would she keep it for me.
‘Better still, I could boil it hard and you can take it up with you.’ She brought it down in a while, wrapped in paper, and when she handed it to me she gave me a wry smile. ‘Let me know if you eat it,’ she said. Which I did, later, and ever after when she saw me she remembered this incident and teased me. Dorothy Allen; passed now.
Marco arrived sometime after breakfast. It had been an agony of a wait, and now we went up to the top floor to a vast room which had chairs in front of a colossal screen set up like a cinema and already there was a spread of food laid out which changed its content as the day wore on. Right then, there was coffee and tea and cold drinks and current buns and Coronation cupcakes in the colours of the Union Jack, and other cakes, and fruit cut up, all sorts.
Marco who’d had a sparser breakfast and didn’t have the butterflies in his stomach as badly as I did though he was equally excited, got himself some food. All I wanted to do was get out onto the flat roof and see what I could see. Daddy was busy being host because all the London Alliance staff had been invited to watch from the roof and plenty others besides, friends, associates, neighbours and so on. It was still early but already the room was beginning to fill. No wonder. You got an incredible view right down Park Lane from Marble Arch to Hyde Park Corner.
It was nippy out there, though. You needed your coat to be out for long. I ran down the stairs for mine. Marco came with me so I could show him our dinky hideout. This led to our first big excitement. Out of one of the flats opposite ours (one of the legitimate ones) came two men and two women dressed to the hilt in scarlet and gold. The men in suits with scarlet sashes. The women in long gowns; one wore diamond earrings and a huge diamond pendant, the other a gold-embroidered cape, and rubies in her ears.
We sunk back against the stairwell. Marco said that they were members of the aristocracy who’d have seats in the Abbey. I hoped they were going to be riding there in one of the coaches. Maybe we could ask them later? Marco tugged my arm. ‘Let’s get back up there.’ I was inclined to wait in case an equally mesmerizing sight emerged from the other flat, but gave in to his tug.
I was outside when I heard a great cheer: the Queen and all her retinue were leaving Buckingham Palace for Westminster Abbey. We rushed inside in time to watch their arrival at The Abbey on the screen. We tried to identify our own Lords and Ladies taking their seat but of course it was impossible. We saw the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh getting out of their carriage and then all the Royal Family in the carriages behind them.
There was lots of talk in the room of how everyone was dressed and then of how beautiful the ceremony was and of the dignity of the Queen (‘Poor thing had so recently lost her father’). The ceremony went on for ages. Getting bored after a bit, I went back outside and, finding I had the hard-boiled egg in my pocket, I unpeeled and ate it, then was embarrassed as there was nowhere to leave the shell. I had to go back inside where I couldn’t see any bins. In the end I left it in a napkin at the back of a table that now had wine and cold drinks on. I did pop back in once or twice in hope that it had magically disappeared, but it was still there!
Tiered seating had been erected beside the roads the procession would travel along. Marco and I looked down on them and at the throngs of people in Hyde Park. I waved and waved hoping someone would raise their flag and wave back. But everyone was listening to the order of the service being announced through loudspeakers.
Then it was over. Our Queen was Queen now. I slipped back inside and found Daddy. I tugged his hand.
‘Oh, hello darling, are you having a good time?’
‘Yes. Are you, Daddy?’
He bent down. ‘Between you and me I don’t believe in so much wealth being bound up in an antiquated system like ours. But – it’s a damned fine show. I can’t deny that, when it comes to pageantry we put on a damned fine show.’
‘The whole world is watching,’ I said, aping the commentators. But his words left me with something novel and mildly unsettling to cogitate over. We didn’t have to have a queen or a king then, was that so? I told Marco while we were waiting for the procession to pass below us. He thought we did. He said it gave us stability.
Eventually the procession turned into Park Lane. Extra flags were passed along on the roof, which was hemmed in with people waving Union Jacks, crowding forward. My father stood with me and Marco. It was beginning to drizzle, the drizzle turning to a fine rain. Luckily the coaches had roofs, you just saw these arms sticking out and waving and the figures dimly inside. The Queen seemed to be sitting upright in her magnificent gown and crown. We were too far away to see her face. We waved and waved and shouted till we were hoarse. Just for the fun of it. The coaches were splendid anyway even if you couldn’t see as much inside as I’d hoped. And the gleaming horses all moving in time, like clockwork. And the blocks of coloured uniforms of the guards and the various bands of riders. Marco loved the Canadian Mounties in their red uniforms.
Then, surprise, down Park Lane rode an open carriage despite the rain. ‘The Queen of Tonga!’ went an appreciative roar. And there was this brave dark curvy woman in yellow silk, waving exuberantly and smiling to us all and looking as if she was having the best of times. I was sure I saw her waving directly at me. Marco said, ‘Don’t be a chump.’ But I saw it. She was waving at me and everyone. And I loved the whole thing, then. And my heart swelled for England, for our Queen and for the marvellous Queen Sãlote Tupou III of Tonga – who was unbothered by the rain and was clearly a person who knew that the best things in life are free!