A Question of Trust by Penny Vincenzi

Author:Penny Vincenzi [VINCENZI, PENNY]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC027200, FIC044000, FIC045000
ISBN: 9781468316155
Publisher: The Overlook Press
Published: 2018-07-09T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 33

1953–4

‘I simply don’t understand it,’ said Tom. ‘It really is quite beyond me. ‘I’m with John Osborne –’

‘Who’s John Osborne?’

‘This brilliant new playwright,’ said Tom slightly irritably. ‘Surely you know he wrote Look Back in Anger. He calls the Royal Family a fatuous industry. My view exactly.’

‘Well, you’d better not let any of your Labour voters hear you say that. They’d lynch you.’

It was true. Coronation fever gripped the nation and royal fervour was at its peak. It had begun with the death of George VI. The lovely young Queen Elizabeth, mother of two small children, and her absurdly handsome husband became the darlings of the press. The New Elizabethan Age was written about every day. The date was set for the coronation, 2 June. A national holiday was declared; every town had street parties and carnivals planned.

An argument raged about televising the event. A fairly new phenomenon, television had been pronounced by the Archbishop of Canterbury as ‘potentially one of the great dangers of the world’. The Duke of Norfolk, who was masterminding the whole thing, was also opposed to it, believing it would rob the ceremony of its mystique. The press wanted it; it was a little-known fact that the Queen, young, shy and already nervous at the prospect of what would be a huge ordeal, did not. But in the end, the cameras were in the Abbey, and the reverently respectful voice of Richard Dimbleby provided the commentary.

The country drowned in a red, white and blue sea of flags and bunting. People came to the capital in their thousands to celebrate, and on the morning of 2 June, when it was announced that the Union Jack had been set on the very top of Mount Everest, it was as if some benign force was guiding the day, ensuring its place in history. Anybody who was anybody had a balcony, or at least a window to watch the procession from; tickets were sold for the stands in the Mall, changing hands on the black market for as much as £50, while seats on balconies that lined the route cost as much as £3,500.

People dressed up in their very best clothes simply to watch it on television; those who were not among the privileged few who owned a set were invited into their friends’ and neighbours’ homes. The hit song of the day, crooned by one Mr Donald Peers, was entitled ‘In a Golden Coach’.

But as if begrudging the people total euphoria, it rained. Hard. On the many thousands who had come to camp out, all along the route, and indeed on the long, long procession of foreign kings and queens, dukes and duchesses, princes and princesses. The star of the procession, apart from the Queen, radiantly beautiful, was undoubtedly Queen Salote of Tonga, who insisted on having the roof of her carriage open and sat waving, smiling determinedly, and getting extremely wet.

The coronation also brought into the public eye one of the great royal romances of all

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