At around 9 am the helicopter began to fade again. But on this occasion it did not return. It continued to fade. With diminishing bursts of propeller noise, brought to us on a slight breeze, it faded away altogether. Putter-putter-putter-put…A few people looked to left and right. The last scraps of murmured conversation, bereft of any cover, died out. And quite noticeably the silence deepened. It was difficult to imagine that it could, but there was a definite moment when a further, sinking gear-shift took place. Some remaining infraction had been focused and the silence became a vast lake, all-embracing, rippled with apprehension. The birds and dogs of Kensington, being sensitive creatures, picked up on this and were altogether stilled.
The moments passed. We waited. The world waited. Everything waited. Then somewhere behind me and over to the right, a military command was barked out. It was distant but very distinct. After it one expected to hear perhaps the salute of cannon fire, or the jingle of faraway harnesses approaching in a gathering roar. But there was nothing. Except, well, an obscure nervous sense that something somewhere had been set in motion by that single command. The silence became a vortex. Everything was sucked into it. It was peaceful no longer but rigid. It held you and you couldn’t move. What was happening? Nothing. Nothing.
Then a wild shriek cut the air. Diana! It was a woman’s cry. The whole enormous crowd was electrified and a shudder ran through it. It was ghastly. Primitive. The shudder hit me like a wave and my whole being fizzed up, heart rushed, legs trembled, I was disorientated, frightened, and for a moment thought I might pass out. And there was a second shriek. Women. They were women. A third screamed Diana! And several more. They were like lightning strikes against that profound, terrible silence whose reverence nonetheless held.
What had happened was that the world had had its first glimpse of the object of lamentation prepared for burial as it emerged on to the streets of London. That image would within seconds be familiar everywhere. But for a few moments it was utterly new and very upsetting. Nothing in the comings and goings of the previous week could have prepared one for it, but the women close by had seen it and reacted.
Yet I couldn’t see it myself. Everywhere immediately round me was still somehow frozen, tense… Now – yes – something was happening – something moving -a few red plumes and caps jogging in a little group above the heads of the crowd. The frogged jackets and serious faces of mounted hussars. And now, finally, yes, I did see it. That rolling thing.
Such a huge build-up through the week, but when it came, it was so small, and accompanied by so few. But its appearance, flitting between heads in front of me, was mesmerising after those terrible shrieks. The coffin draped in the royal standard, with white wreaths upon it, was being drawn along by the King’s Troop on the green gun carriage, the one with the big wheels. It was flanked by twelve Welsh Guardsmen in red who were the pallbearers and on foot. Moving in the lowest of keys and very slowly, this compact group was so weirdly unobtrusive and yet so shockingly beautiful that it became the conduit to something inexplicable. The fingers of my right hand were stuck to my chin. My mouth hung open – yes, this is how it was. In time one loses the intensity of a remarkable experience. One may indeed be embarrassed by exceptional feelings and seek to erase them. So I made notes to counteract that, to adhere to the truth of how it was. Maybe this is what writing is for. So that we can’t disown ourselves.
As it passed by, the gentle riffing of harnesses and horses’ hooves filled the ears. I began to walk through the park with masses of others, hypnotised by the gun carriage and its burden which sometimes seemed to slide along the tops of people’s heads. Those at the roadside could not keep abreast of it because they were jammed to the spot, but those of us in the park could, and I reached the rising ground near the Albert Hall where the view was better. The small cavalcade passed on towards Westminster, jingling quietly through the sea of silence. I walked a little further, paused, and let it go.
It had set off at 9.08 am. This was so that, after a snail’s pace march of three and a half miles, the pallbearers would carry the coffin through the west door of the Abbey as Big Ben struck am. Which is precisely what happened. They were perhaps guided too by the deep tolling of the Abbey’s muffled passing-bell, struck once a minute up to the beginning of the service. The effect of this bell, which marked a very large rhythm, was of the greatest solemnity. But as the coffin moved towards the Abbey through the streets of London, past ranks of rapt figures, later on joined by male members of Diana’s family, I don’t think that the first electrifying moment could be repeated. Bystanders would see it approach and were readied. But when we at Kensington saw it first emerge it was for that instant a dreadful revelation of Death in all its majesty. And those isolated screams from the women enhanced something for us all, something which went to the marrow.
Kensington Gardens had adopted a meadowland policy that year and looking down I saw that my shoes and trousers were soaking wet from dew held by the long grass. So I returned home to change and watch the rest of Di’s funeral on television. But at tea-time as I brewed my umpteenth cuppa I could begin to give way to more lateral reflections, and thought to myself, well, I wonder if that is how Cleopatra went two thousand years ago, not to low murmurings of prayer but to occasional hair-raising shrieks from the riverbanks out of a stunned silence, as her funeral barge floated slowly down the Nile from Upper to Lower Egypt, past the already crumbling temples of Luxor and Karnak and Memphis, locations which fell like guillotines behind the precious cargo, slicing away all possibility of return, for there was only now a moving ahead into something else, something unknown and new, as the barge proceeded over the sluggish waves of the delta and floated onward, onward, out to sea…
Acknowledgments
Among the living and the dead, special thanks are due to Bruno Bayley, Rusi Dalal, James Loader, Dolores Maclaine-Clarke, Maruma, Steven Runciman, and Lincoln Townsend; to Jane Davidson for her encouragement and for permission to quote from her and Alastair Graham’s letters; to Auberon Waugh for his encouragement and for permission to quote from the work of his father, Evelyn Waugh; to Bishop Crispian Hollis for permission to quote from Oxford in the Twenties by his father, Christopher Hollis; to Mrs Brisbane, archivist of Winchester City Council, for assistance with the Bapsy Pavry material; to Peters Fraser & Dunlop on behalf of the Estate of Mervyn Peake for permission to quote briefly from Titus Groan; and to David Higham Ltd. and New Directions Publishing Corp. for permission to quote briefly from Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas.
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