by Paul Gallico
‘Hmpf!’ Granny had snorted. ‘If what? I read the article myself. Ten pounds apiece. That’s for millionaires.’
‘If,’ Will concluded, ‘we went without our summer hols.’
This, for an instant, stilled the clamour within their breasts as well as their excited outcries. Their annual two weeks’ holiday at Morecambe Bay was something wonderful and treasured, and was looked forward to by each of them.
To begin with, Clagg’s status and salary as foreman made it possible. For Violet Clagg it meant two precious weeks of boarding out, eating food cooked by someone else from dishes washed by another, walking on floors scrubbed by a person paid to do it and sleeping in beds she hadn’t had to make.
For Granny it provided whole new sets of ears into which to pour her views on the decadence of everything, the awfulness of modern times and the uselessness of the present generation. And to the children it promised two weeks of heaven: paddling, puddling, swimming, splashing, digging and shrimping, plus all the marvellous and unfamiliar sights and sounds and smells and foods of the seaside. The beach and pier with its games and booths, shops and donkey rides, were paradise itself. Things were there to be bought and tried or tasted with pocket money which their father allowed them for their holiday and which were, of course, never encountered in Little Pudney. Rain or shine made no difference to the boat rides or the band concerts, or for that matter to anything. Christmas and birthdays were secondary festivals. Weeks were counted from 29 August, when they packed up and went home, until the next glorious and seemingly never-arriving 15 August, when once more they would pile into the family car at Little Pudney, Morecambe-bound.
‘That’s it,’ Clagg threw into the stunned silence. ‘I’ve worked it out. We can’t do both. We’d all have to make a sacrifice. Which do you want?’ And then unable to resist the temptation to turn the scales just a trifle in the direction of his own desires, he added, ‘It isn’t often there’s a Coronation, is it – and a Queen?’
The magic of the word ‘Queen’ ran through all of them, even stirring old Granny a little, for she remembered Queen Victoria in her last years.
Yet Clagg had no need to coax the rest of his family on to his side, for the Coronation fever was burning in them and had been for weeks. Already they had put up decorations in the living-room – red, white and blue paper ribbon from the four corners to the chandelier and thence to the fireplace over which hung a picture of the Queen. They had expected on the day the Queen was crowned they would take some part in the celebrations that were being planned in Little Pudney. Now suddenly, unexpectedly and stirringly, the head of the family proposed to move them to the very centre of things, and to Gwendoline Clagg this meant seeing with her own eyes, the adored figure of the Queen.
‘Daddy, Daddy, I want to see the Queen!’ She had not even thought or reflected over the choice. She didn’t know what she expected from this transformation of the nightly going-to-sleep dream into the reality of a person, she only knew that she yearned for it. She would look upon the face of the Queen, her eyes, her hair, and her golden crown.
If Gwendoline craved to see her fantasies thus turned into reality, it was quite the opposite with her brother, who was prone to abandon this same reality for the glory of dreams. Johnny Clagg, aged eleven, was outwardly a most ordinary little boy. He was ordinary in size and looks, at his studies, at kicking a football or bowling at stumps, but the achievements of the John Clagg who lived within this undistinguished person were limitless and magnificent.
They were mostly of a military nature. He had already left Sherwood Forest behind him; he was done with knights in armour. World War II and its soldiers, which was in full tide when he had been born, had captured his lively imagination. His consuming obsession was the Army, and his recurring daydream was winning promotion from Private to Captain Clagg on the field of battle. He was Rifleman, Grenadier, Sapper, Engineer, Dispatch Rider, Tank Commander, Artilleryman, indestructible and heroic. Backing these dreams were picture-books and coloured cards of soldiers and their implements. In his toy cupboard were lead troops and a miniature tank, jeep and field-piece to deploy on the living-room floor. But outside the occasional uniformed soldier home on leave and an obsolete World War I cannon mounted in the main square of Great Pudney, Johnny had never seen the real thing. Now the glorious glittering pageant of the military might of Great Britain and the Commonwealth was offered to be paraded before his eyes. The two weeks by the sea faded into insignificance.
For Violet Clagg the dilemma was more severe. The two weeks were her rest and her recovery, to be weighed against the thrill, glamour and excitement of being in London on that day. It was she, more than any of them, who knew how right her husband had been when he used the word ‘sacrifice’. And then in her mind she made it, not for herself so much as for the children. When Johnny and Gwendoline grew up they would be able to say that they had been to London for the Coronation of the Queen.
‘Well, what do you say?’ Clagg had queried them. ‘It’s one or t’other. We’ll put it to a vote. All in favour of going to the Coronation say “Aye”!’
The treble voices of Johnny and Gwendoline fairly screamed out their ‘Ayes’. Violet’s voice was heard too.
‘All those against?’
‘It’s a squandering of money I call it,’ said Granny. ‘The children need the sunshine and the sea air.’ It was not so much that she didn’t want to go as that she found it constitutionally impossible to agree with anything that any of the others wanted.
Will Clagg, who was usually infuriated by Granny’s intransigence, now did something unusual for him. He went over and chucked the old lady under the chin. ‘Come on, Granny,’ he said, ‘you were around when the last Queen was buried, weren’t you? Don’t you want to see the new one crowned? I’m voting “Aye”.’
Granny Bonner found herself so powerfully and astonishingly moved that she had to blink her eyes lest the others see. It was true, she was the living link between two Queens of England. ‘Well,’ she equivocated, ‘I suppose it mightn’t hurt for one summer if we stay at home.’
‘That makes it unanimous,’ Will Clagg had said. The children had begun to scream and clap their hands and jump about.
*
All day long the registered letter from London, sender Albert Capes, 3 Clacton Road, S.W.14. had been sitting upon the mantelpiece intriguing and tantalising Violet, and Granny as well, though she wouldn’t have admitted it. It had arrived, of course, after Clagg had departed for the mill and the children to school and there was no doubt that it contained the tickets for the Coronation, for the week before Clagg had posted off the money order to his cousin with instructions to purchase them. There they were then surely, in the brown manila cover, thick, bulky, heavier than any letter they had ever received before. There, in that pregnant envelope, reposed the equivalent of those fourteen blissful days at the Shore View Hotel, just outside Morecambe proper.
It was, of course, unthinkable that Vi would open an envelope addressed to her husband, but she found it difficult not to break the seal. For she wanted something to hold, to see and feel, something material which might perhaps begin to alleviate the pangs of the lost holiday. The lure and the excitement of the Coronation were undiminished, but it was as yet too abstract for her to grasp. Those lazy, restful days at the summer hotel, where she didn’t have to appear in the dining-room for a cooked breakfast until half past eight if she didn’t wish to, were something tangible and experienced. The same holiday spent at home in Little Pudney would be just like every other week except that Will would be there cluttering up the house, making Granny even more irritable, while the children would be about with nothing to do.
Granny, too, had been having second thoughts on the validity of giving up all of the pleasant features lumped under the one heading of ‘change of air’ for one day of excitement which probably included being trampled underfoot or getting lost. Each time she passed the envelope on the mantelpiece she would mutter something to
herself which Violet could not quite catch, but by the tone of her voice and her mother’s more than usually sour expression she knew that it was disapproving. It seemed as though the day would never draw to a close.
Yet at last evening had come, bringing the accustomed heavy footfalls on the pavement approaching the house.
Granny said, ‘Late, isn’t he?’
Violet glanced at the clock. ‘He’ll have stopped for one at the George and Dragon.’ The children at their homework heard him and came rushing into the front room, shouting, ‘It’s Dad! Will he open it? Can we see them now?’ And then as he made his entrance, ‘Dad, they’ve come, they’ve come! Open it!’
This Will Clagg had done, after a suitable moment’s pause to assert dignity and authority and examine the exterior of the registered envelope to his satisfaction.
With the children watching impatiently and even Granny looking over her spectacles and stretching her neck from her corner, he had slit the envelope and withdrawn the wonderful, miraculous and wholly unexpected blue and gold tickets which he had now been showing around so proudly in the compartment of the Coronation Special.
At first there had been some moments of confusion as they had gaped at the pasteboards, their twenty-five guinea price mark, the location and the things promised thereon. It seemed that there must have been a mistake of some kind until Clagg noticed that in addition to the five tickets the envelope contained a letter from Bert, which he now unfolded and read aloud:
‘Dear Cousin Will, here are your tickets. They are not where you wrote, they are better than where you thought because I have had a bit of luck which I am glad to pass along to you. One of the fellows in our company here has a friend who knew someone who works in the same place as a man who has the inside on what was going on with the tickets for the Coronation he said. They are marked down and I could get them because the company selling them was over-stocked and I suppose 25 guineas even here in London is pretty high and they wanted to sell them. Anyway I have got them for you for the fifty quid which is what you wanted to pay like you wrote only if it rains you will be sitting in a window drinking champagne like a toff and letting the world go by. Good luck. I wish I was with you. Sorry you are going back the same day I’d have liked to see the kiddies, give them and Vi my love. Yours Bert.’
Now all was clear at last and the wonder and the glory of it fairly dazzled them. Seats in a window! Row A! Hyde Park Corner! (The location was later checked on a map of the procession route printed in the newspapers and found to be absolutely marvellous.) Breakfast! Buffet lunch! Champagne!!!
‘Champagne,’ Violet Clagg whispered to herself and then repeated it out loud: ‘Champagne! I’ve never tasted bubbly.’ And in that moment the two weeks, the very necessary, needed and longed-for two weeks at the Shore View Hotel were wiped from her mind as if a sponge had passed across a chalked slate. It was replaced immediately by a new picture, one plagiarised from scenes from a number of films: the uniformed, dignified-looking butler in the drawing-room holding the napkin-wrapped bottle: ‘More champagne, m’lady?’ Only this time the person holding the thin-stemmed glass waiting for the froth of the high-priced wine to gush into it was not the Countess of Kissmefoot, but Violet Clagg sitting in Row A of the window in Wellington Crescent, Hyde Park Corner. As the Queen went by she would be sipping her first glass of champagne. The years had fallen away from her and suddenly she was like her own children. She had found that bright bit of something that attracts and sells, and every feminine fibre of her was reaching for it.
Even Granny was impressed and found the excitement infectious, though she would have preferred gin to champagne. She had to get in her nasty remark, of course, saying, ‘If I know Bert the seats will be behind a pillar, or Row A will be the last row instead of the first.’ Yet she grudgingly admitted that with breakfast and lunch being served they would not have to take along any sandwiches or fruit for the children and that would save a lot of bother.
And so all of them were gathered there now in the compartment of the Coronation Special, the Clagg family basking in the admiration of their fellow travellers, each one cherishing the particular fancy or dream to which the blue and gold tickets would admit them. The wheels sang their dickety-clax, dickety-clax, and with each turn brought them all closer to the manner in which they were to realise them.
*
Promptly at seven o’clock that morning the engine of the Coronation Special snaked its way into St Pancras Station, where it came to a halt, sighing steam and panting as though out of breath from the trip’s exertions. London that morning was enveloped in a chill, grey drizzle, though the real and memorable Coronation Day downpour had not yet commenced in earnest. A bitter wind whipped the flags and bunting on the buildings and set the gay banners strung across the streets dancing an early-morning tarantella.
The Clagg family emerging from the station kept close together, for never before had they found themselves in such a welter of hurrying humanity, cars, taxis and buses.
Further greeting their astonished and excited eyes were the scrawled placards of the news-vendors: ‘Queen’s Day! Everest conquered! Hillary reaches Top.’
‘What’s Everest, Dad?’ Johnny Clagg asked. Anything conquered was in his domain.
‘A mountain,’ replied his father. ‘The highest mountain in the world. Someone has climbed it,’ and bought a paper.
Johnny’s interest cooled at once. Mountains and mountain-climbing were not his dish unless one took them by storm in the face of devastating enemy fire. But Will Clagg, dipping into the front-page news, felt the thrill of pride and an oddly kindred feeling for a man named Hillary who had accomplished the feat with such pat and extraordinary timing. Obviously he had made a do-or-die effort for his Queen to present her with this hitherto unclimbed peak as a gift for her Coronation Day. Well, he, Will Clagg, could climb no mountains, but he could bring his family to London for her. And there they all were.
He had the simple good sense to ask a policeman about buses and produced the tickets, which the constable examined with respect and admiration. It seemed, according to the officer, that there was no problem at all; a No. 73 bus, that one right over there, would take them all the way, travelling down Tottenham Court Road into Oxford Street and thence down Park Lane and round Hyde Park Corner. He was not sure whether the buses would still be running through that area, but they should not have too far to walk and at any rate there would be plenty of police to direct them to their proper destination.
In spite of the drizzle and the damp, their first glimpse of London that early morning fulfilled every expectation. As they bowled down Oxford Street there were ‘Ohs’ and ‘Ahs’ and ‘Look there!’ and ‘Oh, Daddy, see that?’ or ‘Oh, Mummy, isn’t it beautiful?’ when they passed beneath triumphal archways in gold and blue, topped with the Royal Arms, or rode by shop fronts draped from top to bottom with red, white and blue bunting with colourful pennants and streamers or decked out with rich, armorial banners.
Selfridge’s alone was worth coming far to see, emblazoned and bedecked with flags and heraldry. The streets packed with crowds were a sight in themselves, and as they proceeded down Park Lane their bus sometimes was blocked by the swarms of people endlessly streaming in the direction of Hyde Park Corner before the barrier gates were shut. When the bus was stopped the whispering susurration and shuffling of their feet could be heard, for inner London was a silent city that day.
The vehicle on which they were travelling managed to be one of the last permitted near the area of Wellington Place, and halted at St George’s Hospital on the corner of Knightsbridge. The bus conductor, who had been alerted to the destination of the Clagg family, tapped Will on the shoulder and said, ‘Your stop, sir. Go straight along down past the ’orspital if you can make your way, and you’ll come to Wellington Crescent.’ And he added, ‘You ought to have a good view.’
They dismounted and were engulfed at once in a tumultuous ocean of humanity, and Clagg understood what the b
us conductor had meant by saying, ‘If you can make your way.’ For here were thousands upon thousands of people pushing, shoving, thronging, rubbing shoulders through the area of the great square, some trying to reach the stands, others attempting to get closer to the front ranks already packed solid along the route of procession, roped off and kept clear by the police. Everyone was in the grip of Coronation fever and the very density of the packed crowd and its gaiety made it the most thrilling experience the Claggs had ever known. This was what they had come for and they were now a part of it.
But even more enthralling as they tried, at times almost in vain, to press their way through the throngs in the direction indicated by the bus conductor, was the magic worked by the tickets they possessed, which Will Clagg now held in his hand as he led the way.
‘Tickets? This way, sir! Wellington Crescent? Down there, sir. Open up, please, and let these people through. They’re ticket-holders.’
There were police lines within police lines and lanes roped off and forbidden areas, and others marked ‘Ticket-holders only’, and the talisman pasteboards clutched by Clagg melted them through every barrier, visible and invisible. Never before in their lives had any of them been ‘special’ or deferred to in anything. When there were queues, they queued; when there were ‘Keep Out’ signs, they kept out. And here they were among the favoured. It was heady wine which gave them all the sweetest sensation and made Will Clagg a most proud and happy man.
‘Tickets, sir?’ said another constable. ‘Let’s have a look at them. Wellington Crescent, that’s just below there, sir. First on your right. Come round this way, you’ll find it easier going.’
He led them round the corner of a huge wooden grandstand slanting row upon row to the sky, the front covered with red, white and blue bunting already limp and soaked. Many people were sitting on the narrow wooden planks under blankets or with newspapers over their heads, huddled against the chilly rain.