THE CORONATION OF QUEEN ELIZABETH II                

 

June the 4Coronation Day! This date was surrounded by coloured crayoned stars in school girl diaries all over England, and for months and months before the date actually arrived.  Everyone talked about this day of days to come.  My cousin and I talked about it.

 

       I remember I was playing hopscotch, by myself, having been left friendless by no more sinister occurrence than the odd numbers in my class - eleven, as it happens. 'We're all running away,' the voice said.  I looked up, it was my cousin.  Only too glad to be included in whatever game it was that was on, I ran after her.  I remember I was wearing my school apron, well, we all were, which somehow enforced the idea that running after them was a game, a piece of make believe.

         Life with grandparents when you are small has a particular glow.  It is not that they spoil you, it is that they expect you to fall in with them, and that is oddly exciting.  If they rise at dawn, you rise at dawn, if they serve grand teas with pretty patterned plates and expect you to hand round, that is what you do. Everything they do for you seems to be a treat, just because they are not your parents,just as everything you are to them is special, precisely because you are not their child.

       My mother's housekeeper had great respect for the woman we all knew variously as Ma, or Little Ma, and finally Little Grandmother. 

        'She's one of the old sort,' she used to say proudly.  'Calls a spade a spade and won't stand any nonsense.' 

        This was to say the least.  My little grandmother was an Edwardian from the top of her head to the bottom of her stoutly clad feet.

 

        Living and working in the English countryside brings new insight into life..  So many people claim to live in the country, when really, what they do is own a house in the country, which is truly a different thing.  The difference is noticed when anyone passes by, even in the rain..  Pass by the grandest houses that are visited but not lived in by their owners, and the downstairs shutters are closed, and there are only small 'staff' cars parked.

           If friendship is a marriage then we have been married many times, but we have alas, also been divorced. In Biblical times a chap could go out of his tent and say 'I divorce, I divorce you' three times, and then go back into his tent and chuck the old lady out, if the mood so took him, or dinner had been dicey, or he didn't like the kaftan she was sporting.  Apparently this mood did take the ancients many times and there were many divorces, not to mention rending, of garments.

         It has been said that If you live in Paris at a young enough age, it never leaves you.  Following my sixteenth birthday, I spent a year in Paris on the Left Bank, and it is only now I realise just how much has stayed. Not just the fact that I say'eh voila!' at the slightest occurrence, or'quel domage'when a friend is down on their luck; or the fact that when in philosophical mood I trot out 'well, you know how it is, everyone has the faults of their qualities' always said with a slight shrug of the shoulders, and inevitably met with a blank look.

       Yesterday I had the perfect day, you can see that I did, because, please note the 'O' as in 'O Perfect Day' is without an 'aitch', because somehow once an aitch intrudes 'O' turns to something else. It becomes an 'oh' as in 'oh dear' or 'oh gracious' or even on a really bad day, an 'oh woe is me how I am undone....' kind of day.

       Yesterday there was not an aitch in sight, they had all fled and hidden themselves in giant incinerators, scattered far and wide in places of ugliness where no birds sing.

      Around the time of my birth, my mother decided to become a playwright.  Given the times, it was a brave decision for a woman to embark on that most heartbreaking of careers.  Nothing daunted she sat down and proceeded to write plays. To everyone's surprise, and I hope, delight, THE MAN FROM

THE MINISTRY,a comedy by Madeleine Bingham, was duly presented for a try-out at the Royal Court Theatre on a Sunday night.  From there it transferred to a larger theatre and despite post war gloom subsequently enjoyed a respectable run - most probably because it was a satire on the ludicrous new building regulations.