Grandma Norman and the Queen

Today we offer a Royal Wedding special: a piece from the Granta archive. The novelist and biographer Philip Norman wrote ‘Grandma Norman and the Queen’ in 1985, when it appeared in issue 15 of the magazine. Norman remembers the Royal Family through the stages of his life: as a child, he ate breakfast from his grandma’s commemorative Coronation of Edward VIII bowl; as a schoolboy, he mourned the death of King George VI; as a journalist, he took coffee at Buckingham Palace with a young Prince Charles. Finally, he remembers the Queen’s Silver Jubilee – how the ‘petal-hatted, well-corgied, ever dependable little sovereign’ comforted the nation with her constancy.

Like every English child of the early fifties, I grew up close to the Royal Family. We met almost every week – I at the Scala or Theatre Royal cinema, they on the Movietone newsreel, waving from their usual balcony. There was King George VI, always in Naval uniform, always a little drawn and tired, as if weighed down by the gold rings on his sleeve. There was his wife, the then Queen Elizabeth, smiling hard enough for both of them. There was old Queen Mary in her Edwardian toque, and Princess Elizabeth with the dashing young husband whose name was the same as mine. I knew them as beings of immense importance yet infinite kindliness, employing their incalculable power for my welfare and somehow, among all their vast preoccupations, willing to take a personal interest in me.

My knowledge of them derived chiefly from my father’s mother, Grandma Norman, a tall, loving gipsy rogue of a woman, born six years before Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, whose chief pleasure, apart from Guinness and Craven-A cigarettes, was peering through the railings of Buckingham Palace, hoping to see the Guard change or a Royal limousine glide out. Grandma Norman’s love of royalty transcended time. To her the death of Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, in 1861 was still a cause for keen regret. Edward VII was spoken of with a twinkle, acknowledging his racy life, but also as the last bulwark of pre-1914 Europe. ‘The Kaiser was his cousin, you know; if old King Teddy had lived, there would have been no World War.’ Bound up with that story was the tragedy of Edward’s nephew, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, and ‘the poor Tsarina’ and what had been done to them by the Bolsheviks at Ekatrinburg. The cruelty of it still reverberated near Clapham Common in 1952, now that all such violent death seemed to occur only in history books.

Each morning in her steamy back kitchen, Grandma Norman would give me my puffed wheat in a porridge bowl produced in 1936 for the aborted Coronation of Edward VIII. She had cups, saucers and mugs, too, all embossed with the same pointed, slightly petulant face, set about with standards and imperial lions of an Empire shortly to be renounced. As I ate puffed wheat, Grandma Norman would tell me yet again how a brilliant Prince of Wales had turned into this melancholy temporary King. It all went back to Albert the Prince Consort and his cold aloofness with his son, the future Edward VII, who had reacted by being warm and affectionate with his children, even allowing them to race slices of buttered toast down the front of his evening trousers. But Edward's son, the future George V, though kind, had been formal and withdrawn like Prince Albert, and unable to communicate affection to his son, the doomed eighth Edward. Grandma Norman, at the time, would instantly have joined the ‘King's Party’, unsuccessfully proposed to allow him to marry a divorced woman and still remain sovereign. ‘He's the poor Duke of Windsor now,’ she said, still indignantly as that familiar, half-royal countenance surfaced yet again through the clouds of my cereal milk. ‘It was all that Stanley Baldwin’s fault, plotting the way he did with that Cosmo Lang . . .’

The King I knew was Edward’s successor, a shy, stammering naval officer who, when told he must follow his brother, threw himself down on a sofa and wept. ‘George the Good’ Grandma Norman called him, as did the whole country, for his simple, indomitable determination to share the wartime discomforts of his subjects. He had insisted on having a food ration book like everyone else, and taking only three inches of water in his bath. In drab postwar years, when I was small, the struggle for national reconstruction seemed written on his worried face. He was so concerned, and the Queen so very kind, one felt the whole world – even fierce Maoris and Zulus – being soothed into amity and harmony by their Royal Tours. In 1951, when the King inaugurated the Festival of Britain, marking the centenary of Prince Albert’s Great Exhibition, it truly seemed that the past was over: that Grandma Norman, the Royal family and I should all live happily ever after.

I remember the freckled nose of the boy who turned to me in our junior school singing lesson and casually told me that the King was dead. The rumour skittered back and forth along rows of us like a terrible joke until old Mr Monk the singing teacher leaned on the top of his battered piano and, enunciating each word almost with nausea, told us, ‘The King . . . is . . . dead.’

We were plunged into a period of blackest Victorian mourning. All entertainment programmes on the radio were cancelled. The Movietone newsreel showed only flag-draped coffins and slow-marching Guardsmen, with a sound of eerie, squealing naval pipes that seemed to come direct from the grave. There in endless flashback were the last official duties, the heavily striped sleeve, the face – one could see now – growing greyer and more haggard. 'For all these months . . .’ a solemn voice intoned, ‘the King walked with Death . . .’ No one could say, of course, that he’d been suffering from cancer.

We glimpsed royalty then in its age-old form of self-renewing miracle. ‘The King is dead, long live the Queen.’ When national grief dissolved at last, it was into the sunshiny thrill of Coronation Year. I thought it might go on forever with its strawberry teas, its commemoration spoons, calypsos, bunting, the fleets of all nations drawn up for review off our seaside town like hazy fish, twinkling into a maritime city after dark. Then the unseasonable downpour on Coronation Day itself when we gathered round a neighbour’s TV set: the Queen, so frail in her top-heavy crown, peering shyly round the encrustations of the State Coach; the rain-blurred hours of liveried postillions and marching troops; the Queen of Tonga, waving from her open landau. Grandma Norman told me the Queen of Tonga used to be a cannibal and Noel Coward, at another vantage-point, said the little man with her in the coach was ‘probably her lunch’. Mount Everest had been conquered by Britons only days before. British children like me were told we were ‘New Elizabethans’, standing like Drake and Raleigh on the threshold of our brilliant heritage.

Then, as we know, Elizabeth II ruled for thirty-two years. And nothing she did or said ever spoiled the good opinion of her formed on her Coronation Day.

Harold Nicolson, in his various masterly studies of the Windsor dynasty, marvels repeatedly at their ability to pass through social tempests that have swept most other European Royal houses into extinction, and to emerge not merely intact but mysteriously strengthened in the British people's goodwill. The great example was George V, whose twenty-five year reign encompassed world war, a general strike – almost automatically the prelude to revolution anywhere else – and, finally, a Depression even more cruel than Britain’s present one. Throughout the latter period, as Nicolson himself records, the King did virtually nothing but slaughter pheasants and tend his stamp album. His value was that he did not change. His constancy, through cold, gloomy ages, gave the comfort of some slow-burning night light. Half a century after his death, a pang of sadness still lingers in that final Palace gate bulletin: ‘The King's life is moving peacefully towards its close.’

Elizabeth II has reached back past her troubled father to her grandfather to attain this same quiet constancy. For her first two and a half decades, indeed, she was so constant as to become almost invisible. The smile, the hats, the corgi dogs, all dwelt in the national retina as elementally as Christmas or Test cricket. It took her impending Silver Jubilee, in 1977, to remind one that she had ruled for as long as George V and that, after twenty-five years spanning social and political upheaval of every kind, the dynasty looked as healthy as ever. From the fifties to the seventies the Queen hadn’t put a foot wrong.

It is the first thing you notice: how carefully she advances from the royal car or the royal train, not walking, rather floating on two identical tiny State cushions of air. The clothes are garish perhaps for obvious reasons of visibility: a cherry red coat, emphatic hat – scarlet, it may be, festooned with black objects like African leeches – a shy little hand floated forth towards those forewarned they may shake it.

Grown up as I consider myself in every other way, ‘The Queen’ is, for me, still a phrase full of vague comfort and reassurance. No matter that all the more disagreeable things in Britain are done in the Queen’s name: that ‘Her Majesty’s Service’ encompasses policemen, punitive taxes, a dreadful postal system and prisons currently deteriorating towards nineteenth-century overcrowding and squalor. When I hear of some prisoner detained ‘At Her Majesty’s Pleasure’ – that is, indefinitely – the effect is still maternal benignity. One feels sure that, when she hears of it, the Queen will let him off.

It is a shock to remember how that little cherry red figure is steeped in the art and single-minded practice of hanging on to power. The Royal Family is a chief instrument of our fatal complacency – the belief that the world’s rules don't apply to us, that things are always different in Britain. How we laugh, for instance, at foreign dictators who remain in office only for as long as they can appease and cultivate the army. Few British people, I’m sure, find it at all significant that the Queen spends her official birthday reviewing troops, that each of her sons automatically enlists in one or more armed service, that even the cuddly Queen Mother is ‘Colonel in Chief’ of certain crack regiments. We say it is all for tradition and ceremony and the benefit of tourists. Isn't it also to banish from those crack regiments’ minds any notion that they might one day surround Buckingham Palace with a ring of tanks?

Revolution threatens modern monarchs somewhat less than press scandal. That the Queen has ruled Britain for thirty-two years without a speck of notoriety attaching itself to her is indisputably miraculous.

It’s more miraculous considering the number of potential troublemakers in her family. One thinks of Princess Margaret, a pleasure-loving, erratic person rather like a female Edward VIII, whose misfortunes, time and again, have illustrated how inflexible is her elder sister's belief that happiness must always be sacrificed to constitutional propriety. It was so in 1956 when Princess Margaret could not marry the war hero Group-Captain Peter Townsend because (shades of 1936) he had been married before. It remained so in the late seventies, during her estrangement from Lord Snowdon, when everyone seemed to feel most sorry for the Queen. I remember seeing Princess Margaret at the height of her press torment, at an army camp in the West Country, miserably inspecting a line of eight identical army tanks and their identical crews. Her profile is the Queen’s but without a smile: as if all those coins and stamps and postal orders looked sad and ill at ease and a bit worried about tomorrow.

Prince Philip, too, has sometimes seemed like a decoy for bad publicity with his outbursts of temper, his sardonic faux pas and other manifestations, over the years, of a talented but profoundly under-exploited man. Strange it is to remember how glamorous Prince Philip used to be, putting on an Indian head-dress at the Calgary Stampede and resolutely ‘taking the controls’ of whichever aircraft the Royal party happened to be using.

For fifteen years that pilot’s prowess, along with Lord Snowdon’s photographs and Princess Margaret's fondness for the Beatles, represented the sum total of Royal glamour. En masse, ‘Royals’ were the antithesis of smart. They were, like archbishops and the BBC, a standing British joke, uttered without malice. This was the era of young satirists, of radicalism and classlessness, of Private Eye’s naughty anti-Royal pantheon, ‘Buck House', 'Brenda' and ‘Phil the Greek'. The press covered them incessantly but perfunctorily. Gossip columns had become extinct, it was thought for good. Elsewhere the subject was deemed inimical to sensible prose. Dire memories still lingered of ‘Crawfie’, a nanny to the two princesses in the thirties, whose serialized memoirs in the fifties remained synonymous with a rising of the collective gorge. That death knell name 'Crawfie’ would be sufficient to discourage any proposed article or book on any Royal subject save, perhaps, the abstract principles of monarchy. As a journalistic commodity, the Queen just did not sell.

Such was the 'serious’ media’s indifference that in 1969, just before Prince Charles’s State investiture as Prince of Wales, half a dozen senior journalists were invited to Buckingham Palace for the unprecedented experience of taking morning coffee with the twenty-one-year-old Prince. My editor being otherwise occupied, I was sent along in his place. The six of us were taken in through the Privy Purse Door, shown to a room overlooking The Mall and served with milky coffee and chocolate biscuits wrapped in shiny gold paper. The Prince came from the far end of the room, approaching with great, long, nervous strides as if he was playing Granny’s Footsteps. I remember his shiny old-fashioned ox-blood shoes, and the oddly pale blue Windsor eyes in the weatherbeaten young face – eyes watchful even then, for the ink squirt in the official bouquet. ‘Hello . . .’ he said apologetically. ‘Did you all get away from your offices all right?’ We chatted with him for about an hour. He told us about his passion for digging up Roman remains in Cambridgeshire, and how he disliked putting on his prince’s crown for the investiture rehearsals because it was all bent and dirty. I did not write a word about the encounter; nor, I think, did anyone else present.

The Silver Jubilee altered everything. People were genuinely astonished to realize that twenty-five years had passed since the Coronation; that, in the charmless world of 1977, one found the selfsame petal-hatted, well-corgied, ever dependable little sovereign. The Jubilee celebrations, conceived as a fairly mercenary exercise for the tourist trade, turned into something quite different. Travelling in the Queen's wake as I did on the Jubilee visits to Scotland and Northern Ireland felt like stepping back into postcards of the 1896 Jubilee – the streets skeined with ribbons, the tossing fields of flags, the bewildered delight on tough Celtic faces when the petal hat stopped close to them. I remember how, in Ulster, outside the rings of tanks, sharp-shooters and guard-dogs, people climbed spiked railings, clung to bus-corners, made themselves stick somehow to sheer surfaces, all for the merest glimpse of that cherry-red coat.

This sudden rediscovery of something agreeable and spontaneous in British public life came too late, alas, to benefit the incumbent socialist government. Shortly after the Silver Jubilee there was a general election, producing momentous results. Our fifth female sovereign ratified the administration of our first female Prime Minister. Britain was now headed – in Germaine Greer’s phrase – by ‘a woman who can't tell a joke, and a woman who can't understand one’. We know what has happened to Britain and to the Royal Family since then.

stamp image by Izabella Scott
plane image by Azri Zainul

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