“I remember when King George VI died, coming home and finding my mother in tears,” my mother recalled, shortly after the royal wedding had finished and her own tears had dried up. Her mother’s tears back then had expressed grief; hers on Friday sprang from a tremulous joy mingled with nostalgia.
Growing up in English-speaking South Africa, she and her family — “We were royalists,” she says, smiling — experienced the king’s death and Princess Elizabeth’s elevation to the throne as something personal. They adored the poised young woman who had been thrust, like her father before her, into responsibilities for which she had not been wholly prepared.
In “The King’s Speech,” Elizabeth is portrayed as a grave little girl; for children of the time like my mother, who lived in countries of the British Commonwealth, she was the brightest star in their firmament. As a Girl Guide — the equivalent of the Girl Scouts — my mother and her playmates promised to do their duty to God, country — and the queen.
“You must remember that we didn’t have television in South Africa, not until the 1970s,” my mother explained. “We listened to the coronation on the radio. I was nine.” Her parents, both second-generation South Africans, must have sent away to the United Kingdom, for sometime later a 16 mm film of the great event arrived. It became a family treat, in those pre-TV days, to watch the pageantry unfold again and again on a flickering, whirring projector.
“My friends and I kept scrapbooks of the royal family,” my mother laughs. “We didn’t have celebrities, apart from a few film stars. For us it was the royal family.” She remembers joining a drive to send money to help restore the damage done by German bombing to Westminster Abbey during the war. She earned her contribution by going around the neighborhood, earning sixpences weeding gardens.
To see the queen in Westminster Abbey at her grandson’s wedding this week, no radiant young woman bare-armed in white, but an old one in sharp lemon-yellow, brought feelings of affection — and dismay at the passage of so much time.
An English expatriate friend who lives in Washington and who had taken pains to watch the ceremony live found the pageantry just as moving, but for reasons more to do with national pride.
“You don’t have to be very interested in royalty, you can even be a republican, and yet at the same time be stirred by the idea that the marriage was solemnized at the shrine of an English king who ruled a thousand years ago,” he told me, adding: “In most countries, squadrons of cavalry in the streets suggest revolution. In Britain they are symbols of constitutional stability.”
Why would such an event induce so many non-Commonwealth, non-British, indeed openly anti-monarchical types to set their alarm clocks so early? The explanation, he says, is simple: “Because a royal wedding evokes honor, solemnity, grace, beauty, loyalty and other ancient virtues that are often deprecated today but actually strike a chord deep in many people.”
That — and those crazy hats.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
