The Queen and I

Life lessons from a superstar

The first time I met the Queen was in a school in the East End. I missed the briefing on how to address her and shake her hand because I’d nipped to the loo. When she walked into the room, I forgot to worry about any of that because what hit me was her smile.

In the course of her 96 years, that smile has lit up almost every room she has been in and touched millions, if not billions, of hearts. As soon as I finished typing that sentence, I realised it was the wrong tense. That “has” should go, because it suggests a present, a presence, a gift that has gone. Let me keep it for now.

She was shorter than I expected and more beautiful. This was twenty years ago, so she would have been 75 or 76. An age, in fact, when women are called “old ladies” and largely dismissed. She was 10 years older than my mother. My mother was elegant and had a beauty of her own, but the Queen had something else. Star quality, I suppose you’d call it, a kind of lustre, and perfect, peachy skin.

I was Director of the Poetry Society, and had helped to organise some poetry-related events for the Queen’s Golden Jubilee. One of them was a poetry workshop in a school in the East End. The Guyanese poet John Agard was giving it and over the course of the workshop they clearly forged a bond. My meeting with the Queen was brief. You’re meant to remember what the monarch says to you, but all I remember was her quizzical gaze and her smile.

I had seen the Queen a couple of times before. The first was in Windsor Great Park. We were there for a family picnic. “Look!” said my father, in a tone of excitement we rarely heard. “It’s the Queen!” And there she was, in a headscarf, driving her own car.

My father is dead, my mother is dead, my sister is dead, my brother is dead, so I can’t check the details. Was the Queen really able to zoom through Windsor Great Park with no security? Was there another car following behind? I don’t know, but I would swear on a Bible (or Shakespeare, or Keats or whatever you pick for me) that on a family picnic I saw the Queen.

The next time I saw her was at Buckingham Palace. This time, she was a speck in a crowd in a bright hat and dress. I was wearing a turquoise Indian skirt from Top Shop and a slightly tacky silver belt. My father was a civil servant and invitations to Palace Garden parties were, I think, rotated round the office. I was eighteen and my sister, Caroline was 23. There was some quaint rule that daughters between the ages of eighteen and twenty-something were allowed to accompany their parents. Perhaps it was to give guests the hope that their daughter might bag an aristocrat. I didn’t bag anything except some scones and cake.

I was militantly left-wing at the time and probably tried to give the impression that I took the whole thing with a pinch of anthropological detachment. My mother certainly didn’t. She was Swedish, fiercely anti the English class system and private schools, but she loved, she really loved, the Queen. Every Christmas Day, at 3pm, we would gather round the TV and watch my mother cry.

As a child in another country, my mother had heard a teenage princess Elizabeth give a speech to three million children evacuated from cities during the war.“My sister Margaret Rose and I feel so much for you,” she said, “as we know from experience what it means to be away from those you love most of all.”

My mother was not evacuated. The less said about Sweden’s role in the war, the better, but my mother was impressed when Princess Elizabeth trained as a mechanic just before the end of the war. She was, it was clear, a grafter. She married her handsome prince, as the fairy tales say princesses should, but she was always a grafter. She was working until the day before she died.

My mother didn’t marry a prince, but she did marry a handsome diplomat. And she was a grafter, too. Even when she couldn’t get out of her hospital bed, she was working her way through her long, long list of Christmas cards. I got quite a few messages from people who were shocked to get a card from her after she died.

A Freudian might say that I am mixing my mother up with the Queen. In a way, I suppose, I am. For the seventy years of her reign, most of us felt that the Queen was a kind of mother to the nation. She was matriarch and monarch. She was headmistress and film star. Duty and glamour, but without the film star’s scourge. The thing about the Queen was that she didn’t seem to have an ego. She really did put other people first.

Somehow, as those Christmas messages from the Palace mounted up, I stopped sneering and started welling up. When the Queen had her “annus horribilis”, I wanted to hug her. We had had ours a couple of years before. To be honest, we had quite a few, but 1990 was one of the worst. My mother stayed stoical. The Queen stayed stoical. I… well, not so much. My body had a breakdown, I renounced my faith, told God to f*** off and Satan that he’d won. But we can’t all be like the Queen.

In 2002, the then poet laureate, Andrew Motion, asked me if the Poetry Society would help him organise a national poetry competition for the Queen’s Golden Jubilee. I’m not sure if it’s the kind of thing you can say no to, but of course I said yes. I went to regular meetings at Buckingham Palace. Once, a military band in the courtyard started playing James Bond medleys. We were in a meeting with about fifteen officials and I got the giggles. Every time I saw my colleague Martin’s mouth twitch, I felt a delicious wave rising up and clamped my mouth shut.

Now, of course, we know how the Queen felt about James Bond. Her dramatic arrival at the Olympics with him, ten years later, was probably the most patriotic moment I have ever had.

At the award ceremony for the Golden Jubilee poetry competition, I met the Queen again. I was in a huddle with Andrew Motion and John Agard when a flunkey walked her over. John flirts with everyone and he flirted with the Queen. I could see from the glint in her eye that she was charmed.

(A few years later, the new poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, told me that she had had a conversation with the Queen about Kipling. “He is,” said the Queen, “exceedingly good”.)

It was another poet, the Jamaican poet Lorna Goodison, who wrote a poem called “I am becoming my mother”. I often think of it because I wonder if I am. I love the Queen. I mean I loved the Queen. I don’t just mean that I admired her, that I thought she was an excellent role model, of public service and graft. I mean that I felt a deep well of affection for a woman who was charming, funny and astute. She was extremely sharp-witted. She cut to the heart of things in a way few politicians do. “Why did no one see it coming?” she asked after the global financial crisis in 2008. Well, quite.

She met Mandela. She met Trump. She was polite to everyone, but it was clear who she liked. It was clear, for example, that she loved Obama and Obama loved her. Good ‘uns can spot each other. We all know what she thought of Margaret Thatcher.

Anyway, she’s gone now. We were exceedingly lucky to have her. And Great Britain doesn’t feel half as great.