What does the passing of Queen Elizabeth II mean to me, a transplanted Brit who has spent more years out of England than in the country of my heritage stretching back to 1066 when an ancestor of mine was one of William the Conqueror’s ‘liege men’.
Yet I have never met Queen Elizabeth nor even queued, camera in hand and anxious to catch a glimpse of her as she went about her lifetime of service to Britain and the Commonwealth.
Yet this diminutive, always brightly dressed figure – easier to spot by the admiring and the curious - has quite simply been a constant in my life. Remote it is true but nevertheless like a rock amidst the sea surf of my comings and goings.
Already a teenager and heir apparent by the time I was born, she married her handsome Prince as I began boarding school and was crowned queen in the first televised coronation as I listened to the service on the radio, along with the millions who did not yet possess that wonder of the modern age.
In my salad days, I sometimes wondered, with a touch of envy it must be admitted, what it would be like to live in that gilded fishbowl, surrounded by retainers to do my every bidding, from footmen to lord chamberlains.
As for all those palaces!
Those horses!
No, she was welcome to her corgis. I have never been a fan.
It took a modicum of maturity to realize that no matter the day, no matter the drama, those red dispatch boxes of state are a daily constant, despite the fact that as a constitutional monarch, there is no saying,’ I don’t agree, take it away and do it again’! There is no pleading sickness, tiredness or just plain crankiness at the prospect of yet another day filled with ribbon cuttings, meetings and greetings, or endless state dinners when all you want is a quiet evening in front of the ‘telly’.
It is only during the last few years, as the curtain of Royal privacy has been stretched thin and even torn wide at times, and I have reached my so-called ‘golden years’, that I have begun to appreciate the advantages we mere subjects have; a wayward child, a broken marriage hurt to be sure but at least family troubles and heartbreaks are not broadcast for the entire world to read and comment on.
Most of us remember the death of Prince William and Prince Harry’s mother and the ensuing furore when the Queen did not immediately rush to London but stayed in Scotland with her grandsons.
‘She was by my side at my happiest moments. And she was by my side during the saddest days of my life,’ Prince William said the other day in a heartfelt tribute to his grandmother.
And what grandmother would not put her two grieving grandchildren before comforting her subjects?
As I watch clips of the line of mourners waiting for hours to file past in the late queen’s coffin lying in state in Westminster Hall, I am transported back to that cold January night in 1965 when I, along with thousands of other ordinary people, shuffled slowly along a similar route to file past the coffin of Sir Winston Churchill, who led Britain to victory in the Second World War.
Why were we there? What did we hope to achieve?
Absolutely nothing as far as most of us were concerned, I believe. We were there, as were the hundreds and thousands of her subjects and visitors this past week, simply to say ‘Thank you’ for a job well done.
