Coronation (2 page)

‘I only said it seemed like squandering money,’ Granny snapped, thus answering the question in the minds of the listeners as to who had vetoed the proposition, ‘when the children ought to be having their two weeks by the sea.’

‘We talked her into it,’ Will Clagg said good-humouredly, winking at his wife.

The draper’s wife said, ‘Oh, but surely you’re glad now that you’re going?’

Granny wasn’t going to give in that easily. ‘That’s to be seen,’ she said testily.

Clagg laughed. ‘When Granny here gets to heaven,’ he said, ‘she won’t believe it until the angels show her their wings are growing and not stuck on!’

For an instant behind her spectacles Granny’s little eyes screwed up in an expression as close to hatred as she was capable of assuming. She didn’t like to be reminded of heaven or, if not heaven, then dissolution, which was for her now an ever-present eventuality. She was seventy-three and of course subject to those notifications and warnings delivered by weight of years – a twinge here, a creaking, an unexplained ache or pain. Yet the alarms these set off in her mind were real enough. Three score years and ten was the allotted span. She had exceeded it by three, and in one sense considered herself flying in the face of the Bible. Granny was filled with an insatiable curiosity as to what the next day would bring, besides which there were Johnny and Gwendoline growing up and needing her to instil the old-fashioned virtues. Bossing was her life.

Everyone smiled at Granny in a friendly and amused manner at Clagg’s joke, for all of them had at one time or another known old ladies like that, and none of them guessed that she was both angry at and frightened of the word ‘heaven’. Carefully, almost tenderly, Clagg restored the tickets to his pocket.

No man in the United Kingdom would have been more upset, astonished and incredulous than Will Clagg had he been told that the reason he had gathered up his family and journeyed to London for the Coronation was that he was in love with the Queen of England.

He was not alone in this. Not since the time of Elizabeth the First had such a surge of chivalrous passion swept through the hearts of the men of Great Britain as on this Coronation Day. Modern times or no, the young man in the bowler hat, the countryman in his boots, the labourer in his overalls, each had felt the all-encompassing sweep of mediaeval woman-worship, the
Domnei
of the troubadors. All England and the Commonwealth too were united in a gigantic, emotional love affair with their Queen-to-be-crowned. It had merely engaged Will Clagg a little sooner.

It had come to him, as a matter of fact, at the passing of the late King, when he had seen a picture of her in the newspapers upon her swift and sudden return from Africa.

She had been photographed hesitating a moment as she descended the steps of the aircraft, and she was seen thus, a tiny and forlorn figure in black, over the backs of her Ministers ranged before her in their sombre clothing like crows lined up on a pole. She had left the country as a gay young Princess and she was returning a saddened Queen. Clagg had looked upon the picture long and silently and felt his heart go out to her.

She had asked all of her subjects to pray for her at that time. Outwardly Clagg was neither emotional nor demonstrative, nor what one would have called a religious man. No one would ever know that he had done as the Queen had requested and that night had thought a silent prayer for her, a simple one in which he asked something or someone whose name was God, without being at all able to conceive what this God was like, to help the Queen, to save and keep her. But from that moment on he was bound to her, and the journey to London was something very ancient in his blood, a drawing of himself as a loyal subject to the foot of the throne, a gesture, a fealty and a courtesy as well.

But as for the manner of expressing his emotions, or rather turning them into action, Clagg was all artlessness and directness itself. He simply said, one Sunday afternoon early in April at the dinner table of their semi-detached house at No. 52 Imperial Road, Little Pudney, ‘Look here, what would you say to all of us going to London for the Coronation?’

The query had shattered, staggered, uplifted, hypnotised, terrified and enthralled his family. He had thrown it on to the table like a live fuse, where it burned and sputtered, throwing out the smoke and flame of adventure.

Not that they weren’t already Coronation-minded; the newspapers and magazines had been full of it for months with articles and photographs, and the tension and excitement was already beginning to mount and spread to the farthest corner of the United Kingdom and across the seas to the Commonwealth.

Violet Clagg was the first to react to the glory that had been proffered, the prospect so rich, so glamorous and so deeply craved by her person starved for change and excitement. She echoed his words: ‘Go to London! For the Coronation! All of us? Oh, Will!’ And the depth of her desire was expressed in the way she spoke the last two words. But thereafter all of the old fears and frustrations and disappointments took over. ‘But we couldn’t manage standing in the street with the children all night. They couldn’t possibly.’ For there had already been stories that people were planning to reserve places by the kerbside where the procession would pass by establishing squatters’ rights and sleeping there for nights before.

Johnny had cried, ‘Who’d care? I could see the soldiers!’

Violet continued, as though anxious as quickly as possible to voice all of the things against: ‘And Mother’s too ol . . . I mean, her feet swell when she stands.’

‘Bother my feet!’ Granny had snapped. ‘Do you want the children to catch their death of cold? What if it rains? You want them sitting out there all night catching pneumonia? You must be out of your mind, Will Clagg.’

‘No, no, no!’ Will had shouted. ‘You never let a man get in a word in his own house. Who said anything about sitting up all night or standing in the streets? We could have seats in a stand. A stand with a cover over it—’

‘Never get ’em this late,’ Granny had mumbled.

Gwendoline had cried out, ‘Could I see the Queen really, Daddy? Daddy, would we see the Queen in her gold carriage?’

Clagg regarded her fondly for a moment, ignoring his mother-in-law, and then said, ‘Right up close enough to wave to and she’d wave straight back.’ He turned to the others. ‘That’s how it would be. There was an article in the paper this morning how you could get tickets. We could manage it—’

‘Hmpf!’ Granny had snorted. ‘If what? I read the article myself. Ten pounds apiece. That’s for millionaires.’

‘If,’ Will concluded, ‘we went without our summer hols.’

This, for an instant, stilled the clamour within their breasts as well as their excited outcries. Their annual two weeks’ holiday at Morecambe Bay was something wonderful and treasured, and was looked forward to by each of them.

To begin with, Clagg’s status and salary as foreman made it possible. For Violet Clagg it meant two precious weeks of boarding out, eating food cooked by someone else from dishes washed by another, walking on floors scrubbed by a person paid to do it and sleeping in beds she hadn’t had to make.

For Granny it provided whole new sets of ears into which to pour her views on the decadence of everything, the awfulness of modern times and the uselessness of the present generation. And to the children it promised two weeks of heaven: paddling, puddling, swimming, splashing, digging and shrimping, plus all the marvellous and unfamiliar sights and sounds and smells and foods of the seaside. The beach and pier with its games and booths, shops and donkey rides, were paradise itself. Things were there to be bought and tried or tasted with pocket money which their father allowed them for their holiday and which were, of course, never encountered in Little Pudney. Rain or shine made no difference to the boat rides or the band concerts, or for that matter to anything. Christmas and birthdays were secondary festivals. Weeks were counted from 29 August, when they packed up and went home, until the next glorious and seemingly never-arriving 15 August, when once more they would pile into the family car at Little Pudney, Morecambe-bound.

‘That’s it,’ Clagg threw into the stunned silence. ‘I’ve worked it out. We can’t do both. We’d all have to make a sacrifice. Which do you want?’ And then unable to resist the temptation to turn the scales just a trifle in the direction of his own desires, he added, ‘It isn’t often there’s a Coronation, is it – and a Queen?’

The magic of the word ‘Queen’ ran through all of them, even stirring old Granny a little, for she remembered Queen Victoria in her last years.

Yet Clagg had no need to coax the rest of his family on to his side, for the Coronation fever was burning in them and had been for weeks. Already they had put up decorations in the living-room – red, white and blue paper ribbon from the four corners to the chandelier and thence to the fireplace over which hung a picture of the Queen. They had expected on the day the Queen was crowned they would take some part in the celebrations that were being planned in Little Pudney. Now suddenly, unexpectedly and stirringly, the head of the family proposed to move them to the very centre of things, and to Gwendoline Clagg this meant seeing with her own eyes, the adored figure of the Queen.

‘Daddy, Daddy, I want to see the Queen!’ She had not even thought or reflected over the choice. She didn’t know what she expected from this transformation of the nightly going-to-sleep dream into the reality of a person, she only knew that she yearned for it. She would look upon the face of the Queen, her eyes, her hair, and her golden crown.

If Gwendoline craved to see her fantasies thus turned into reality, it was quite the opposite with her brother, who was prone to abandon this same reality for the glory of dreams. Johnny Clagg, aged eleven, was outwardly a most ordinary little boy. He was ordinary in size and looks, at his studies, at kicking a football or bowling at stumps, but the achievements of the John Clagg who lived within this undistinguished person were limitless and magnificent.

They were mostly of a military nature. He had already left Sherwood Forest behind him; he was done with knights in armour. World War II and its soldiers, which was in full tide when he had been born, had captured his lively imagination. His consuming obsession was the Army, and his recurring daydream was winning promotion from Private to Captain Clagg on the field of battle. He was Rifleman, Grenadier, Sapper, Engineer, Dispatch Rider, Tank Commander, Artilleryman, indestructible and heroic. Backing these dreams were picture-books and coloured cards of soldiers and their implements. In his toy cupboard were lead troops and a miniature tank, jeep and field-piece to deploy on the living-room floor. But outside the occasional uniformed soldier home on leave and an obsolete World War I cannon mounted in the main square of Great Pudney, Johnny had never seen the real thing. Now the glorious glittering pageant of the military might of Great Britain and the Commonwealth was offered to be paraded before his eyes. The two weeks by the sea faded into insignificance.

For Violet Clagg the dilemma was more severe. The two weeks were her rest and her recovery, to be weighed against the thrill, glamour and excitement of being in London on that day. It was she, more than any of them, who knew how right her husband had been when he used the word ‘sacrifice’. And then in her mind she made it, not for herself so much as for the children. When Johnny and Gwendoline grew up they would be able to say that they had been to London for the Coronation of the Queen.

‘Well, what do you say?’ Clagg had queried them. ‘It’s one or t’other. We’ll put it to a vote. All in favour of going to the Coronation say “Aye”!’

The treble voices of Johnny and Gwendoline fairly screamed out their ‘Ayes’. Violet’s voice was heard too.

‘All those against?’

‘It’s a squandering of money I call it,’ said Granny. ‘The children need the sunshine and the sea air.’ It was not so much that she didn’t want to go as that she found it constitutionally impossible to agree with anything that any of the others wanted.

Will Clagg, who was usually infuriated by Granny’s intransigence, now did something unusual for him. He went over and chucked the old lady under the chin. ‘Come on, Granny,’ he said, ‘you were around when the last Queen was buried, weren’t you? Don’t you want to see the new one crowned? I’m voting “Aye”.’

Granny Bonner found herself so powerfully and astonishingly moved that she had to blink her eyes lest the others see. It was true, she was the living link between two Queens of England. ‘Well,’ she equivocated, ‘I suppose it mightn’t hurt for one summer if we stay at home.’

‘That makes it unanimous,’ Will Clagg had said. The children had begun to scream and clap their hands and jump about.

*

All day long the registered letter from London, sender Albert Capes, 3 Clacton Road, S.W.14. had been sitting upon the mantelpiece intriguing and tantalising Violet, and Granny as well, though she wouldn’t have admitted it. It had arrived, of course, after Clagg had departed for the mill and the children to school and there was no doubt that it contained the tickets for the Coronation, for the week before Clagg had posted off the money order to his cousin with instructions to purchase them. There they were then surely, in the brown manila cover, thick, bulky, heavier than any letter they had ever received before. There, in that pregnant envelope, reposed the equivalent of those fourteen blissful days at the Shore View Hotel, just outside Morecambe proper.

It was, of course, unthinkable that Vi would open an envelope addressed to her husband, but she found it difficult not to break the seal. For she wanted something to hold, to see and feel, something material which might perhaps begin to alleviate the pangs of the lost holiday. The lure and the excitement of the Coronation were undiminished, but it was as yet too abstract for her to grasp. Those lazy, restful days at the summer hotel, where she didn’t have to appear in the dining-room for a cooked breakfast until half past eight if she didn’t wish to, were something tangible and experienced. The same holiday spent at home in Little Pudney would be just like every other week except that Will would be there cluttering up the house, making Granny even more irritable, while the children would be about with nothing to do.