In this time of TV-enforced mourning, when some of the world is reflecting on the loss of a Queen and the arrival of a long-foreshadowed King, I can offer no special insight into the British royal family or Charles III - beyond the fact that he is a truffle grower with a truffière at his old home at Highgrove, and truffle trees inherited from his father at Sandringham. It remains to be seen if foreign dignitaries will be served the fruits of his labours (or of his labourers, to be more exact), or if he will regale them with tales of truffle hunts and buried treasure, how a kennel of corgis were given a new purpose in life. I rather think not. He will have people for that.
My family has had very little to do with royalty, beyond the knee-jerk deference expected of the Welsh working class. My mother, who at 99 was born before and has outlived the Queen, collected some royal memorabilia. A few plates commemorating this or that regal rite of passage. They’re in a box, to be sorted, like so much of the contents of her old home. I can’t recall ever being taken to a royal parade or visit, never given a paper flag to wave, though I have cousins who were. Growing up in remote corners of Scotland and Wales will do that for you.
My secondary school - a grammar school in Kent - was never likely to be troubled by the presence of royalty, nor was it. And when I went to university, it wasn’t Cambridge, the King’s alma mater, but a somewhat more august institution. I had to make do with rubbing shoulders with future politicians like Peter Mandelson and Benazir Bhutto - though in both cases it was more a case of being in the same place at the same time, rather than any physical contact or exchange of views. Mandelson and Alan Bullock had one thing in common; they both thought I played my music too loud.
In the same way that I rejected the religious convictions of my parents, I refused to share their deference to the royal family. At first this was just a facet of teenage rebellion, like affecting long hair and playing Hot Rats at high volume while doing homework, but as the years passed it solidified into a dislike of the paraphernalia of royalty, and the political and social structures that sustained them. Sounds grand. It amounted to refusing to watch royal events on TV, or arranging to go for a row on the Thames during royal weddings. I am no Cromwell, in other words. I watched The Crown.
I have however slept in the same bed as the late Queen. More than once.
When we moved to New Zealand 26 years ago, we set up home in my wife’s parents’ house in Christchurch. This was a large, rambling old building on a quiet street, surrounded by big trees and a lovely garden, with a stream full of eels at the back. An hour before NZ1 landed in Auckland in January 1996 they showed an introduction to New Zealand video. It featured the in-law’s house. Twice a day, minibus loads of tourists would stop outside and wander the bosky street. The bold might try an unofficial garden exploration and have to be shooed away.
Long before my time, the house had been ruled by a considerable matriarch, a woman who would no more think of going to Ballantynes without a hat and gloves than she would tolerate artificial fur accoutrements1. Many of the house’s pretensions could be laid at her (exquisitely clean) doorstep.
In the year of my birth, the Queen and Prince Philip spent a few days in Christchurch on their post-Coronation world tour. They stayed at the Clarendon Hotel. There was talk of a garden visit. Great preparations were made, but it was cancelled at the last minute because she was running late. The family history does not relate who ate the sandwiches.
In 1996, all that was left of the Clarendon Hotel was a frontage pinned on to a more modern high rise. I used to go to a gym there, a rather upmarket affair with a great personal trainer and a few celebrity members that as a new resident I didn’t recognise. Hi Jason, hi Phil! Now there is nothing left but a car park on a windy corner.
HRH spent four nights in the Clarendon, and the hotel had gone to great lengths to make her welcome. Two large single beds had been specially designed and constructed for the use of the young couple. Cast iron frames, heavy native wood headboards and footboards, firm but comfortable mattresses. When the royals had moved on, the matriarch acquired them both, and installed them in her bedroom. There they stayed for 40 years.
My mother and father in-law preferred a bedroom at the front of the house, so when we arrived, we were given that bedroom, still equipped with the Queen’s beds. My wife and I duly put them to the fullest use, at least briefly2. The mattresses were well past being comfortable, nor had I travelled to the land of my wife’s fathers to take up sleeping in a knobbly single bed, separated from my beloved by a cold trench and tightly tucked sheets. When the container arrived with last of our belongings, the Queen’s beds were dismantled and shut away in the loft and our double bed was installed.
A few years later the house was sold, and the beds were moved to a garage in Oxford (not the one with dreaming spires). Eventually they went the way of all unloved furniture, and were cleared out. Someone somewhere in Canterbury may still be sleeping on them, but more likely they have long since contributed to landfill or climate change.
As people pass into history, their stories and the objects attached to them also fade. In the case of Elizabeth II, there will be official histories and museum displays, definitive documentaries and revisionist biographies. The first draft of her hagiography has already been written, and as this century puts on years her reign will be sanitised by golden memory. As the last of the new Elizabethans die, she may be remembered more for Olivia Coleman’s interpretation of her reign in an old TV series than as a figurehead who acquired cultural significance through an accident of birth and subsequent longevity.
Few will remember where she slept in January 1954. But I will. For a few more years at least.
We have a chest full of her gloves and furs in my office.
The inquiring mind may want to know whether I slept in the Queen’s bed or Philip’s. I have no means of knowing, but did sleep, at one time or another, in both.