The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett.
Title: The Uncommon Reader.
Author: Alan Bennett.
Genre: Fiction, novella, humour, alternative history, books.
Country: England, U.K.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 2007.
Summary: Led by her yapping corgis to the Westminster travelling library outside Buckingham Palace, the Queen finds herself taking out a novel by Ivy Compton-Burnett. Duff read though it is, the following week her choice proves more enjoyable and awakens in Her Majesty a passion for reading so great that her public duties begin to suffer. And so, as she devours work by everyone from Hardy to Brookner to Proust to Beckett, her royal duties and responsibilities begin to suffer, her outlook on the word begins to change, and her equerries conspire to bring the Queen's library to a close.
My rating: 7.5/10
My review:
♥ It was the dogs' fault. They were snobs and ordinarily, having been in the garden, would have gone up the front steps, where a footman generally opened them the door. Today, though, for some reason they careered along the terrace, barking their heads off, and scampered down the steps again and round the end along the side of the house, where she could hear them yapping at something in one of the yards.
It was the City of Westminster travelling library, a large removal-like van parked next to the bins outside one of the kitchen doors.
♥ The Queen hesitated, because to tell the truth she wasn't sure. She'd never taken much interest in reading. She read, of course, as one did, but liking books was something she left to other people. It was a hobby and it was in the nature of her job that she didn't have hobbies. Jogging, growing roses, chess or rock-climbing, cake decoration, model aeroplanes. No. Hobbies involved preferences and preferences had to be avoided; preferences excluded people. One had no preferences. Her job was to take an interest, not to be interested herself. And besides, reading wasn't doing. She was a doer.
♥ "She was not a popular author, ma'am."
"Why, I wonder? I made her a dame."
Mr Hutchings refrained from saying that this wasn't necessarily the road to the public's heart.
♥ "To tell you the truth, ma'am, I never got through more than a few pages. How far did Your Majesty get?"
"Oh, to the end. Once I start a book I finish it. That was the way one was brought up. Books, bread and butter, mashed potato - one finishes what;s on one's plate. That's always been my philosophy."
♥ The Pursuit of Love turned out to be a fortunate choice and in its way a momentous one. Had Her Majesty gone for another duff read, an early George Eliot, say, or a late Henry James, novice reader that she was she might have been put off reading for good and there would be no story to tell. Books, she would have thought, were work.
♥ The following day the Queen had one of her regular sessions with her private secretary, with as one of the items on the agenda what these days is called human resources.
"In my day," she had told him, "it was called personnel." Although actually it wasn't. It was called "the servants." She mentioned this, too, knowing it would provoke a reaction.
"That could be misconstrued, ma'am," said Sir Kevin. "One's aim is always to give the public no cause for offense. 'Servants' sends the wrong message."
"Human resources," said the Queen, "sends no message at all. At least not to me."
♥ ..she wanted to read that too, plus anything else besides he thought she might fancy.
This commissions caused him some anxiety. Well read up to a point, he was largely self-taught, his reading tending to be determined by whether an author was gay or not. Fairly wide remit though this was, it did narrow things down a bit, particularly when choosing a book for someone else, and the more so when that someone else happened to be the Queen.
♥ The Queen, though, might have been less pleased had she known that Norman was unaffected by her because she seemed to him so ancient, her royalty obliterated by her seniority. Queen she might be but she was also an old lady, and since Norman's introduction to the world of work had been via an old people's home on Tyneside old ladies held no terrors for him. To Norman she was his employer, but her age made her as much patient as Queen and in both capacities to be humoured, though this was, it's true, before he woke up to how sharp she was and how much wasted.
♥ But though it was called the library and was indeed lined with books, a book was seldom if ever read there. Ultimatums were delivered here, lines drawn, prayer books compiled and marriages decided upon, but should one want to curl up with a book the library was not the place. It was not easy even to lay hands on something to read, as on the open shelves, so called, the books were sequestered behind locked and gilded grilles. Many of hem were priceless, which was another discouragement. No, if reading was to be done it were better done in a place not set aside for it. The Queen thought that there might be a lesson there and she went back upstairs.
♥ What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
But there was regret, too, and mortification at the many opportunities she had missed. As a child she had met Masefield and Walter de la Mare; nothing much she could have said to them, but she had met T.S. Eliot, too, and there was Priestley and Philip Larkin and even Ted Hughes, to whom she'd taken a bit of a shine but who remained nonplussed in her presence. And it was because she had at that time read so little of what they had written that she could not find anything to say and they, of course, had not said much of interest to her. What a waste.
♥ "I never seem to find the time."
"That's what a lot of people say. One must make the time. Take this morning. You're going to be sitting outside the town hall waiting for me. You could read then."
"I have to watch the motor, ma'am. This is the Midlands. Vandalism is universal."
With Her Majesty safely delivered into the hands of the lord lieutenant, Summers did a precautionary circuit of the motor, then settled down in his seat. Read? Of course he read. Everybody read. He opened the glove compartment and took out his copy of the Sun.
♥ Since he was from New Zealand and something of a departure when he was appointed, Sir Kevin Scatchard had inevitably been hailed in the press as a new broom, a young(ish) man who would sweep away some of the redundant deference and more flagrant flummeries that were monarchy's customary accretions, the Crown in this version pictured as not unlike Miss Havisham's wedding feast - the cobwebbed chandeliers, the mice-infested cake and Sir Kevin as Mr Pip tearing down the rotting curtains to let in the light. The Queen, who had the advantage of having once been a breath of fresh air herself, was unconvinced by this scenario, suspecting that this brisk Antipodean wind would in due course blow itself out. Private secretaries, like prime minsters, came and went, and in Sir Kevin's case the Queen felt she might simply be a stepping stone to those corporate heights for which he was undoubtedly headed. He was a graduate of the Harvard Business School and one of his publicly stated aims ("setting out our stall," as he put it) was to make the monarchy more accessible. The opening of Buckingham Palace to visitors had been a step down this road, as was the use of the garden for occasional concerts, pop and otherwise. The reading, though, made him uneasy.
"I feel, ma'am, that while not exactly elitist it sends the wrong message. It tends to exclude."
"Exclude? Surely most people can read?"
"They can read, ma'am, but I'm not sure that they do."
"Then, Sir Kevin, I am setting then a good example."
♥ In fact she knew perfectly well (Norman again), but to her everybody's name was immaterial, as indeed was everything else, their clothes, their voice, their class. She was a genuine democrat, perhaps the only one in the country.
♥ "Pass the time?" said the Queen. "Books are not about passing the time. They're about other lives. Other worlds. Far from wanting time to pass, Sir Kevin, one just wishes one had more of it. If one wanted to pass the time one could go to New Zealand."
♥ ..it left the Queen troubled, and wondering why it was this at this particular time in her life she had suddenly felt the pull of books. Where had this appetite come from?
Few people, after all, had seen more of the world than she had. There was scarcely a country she had not visited, a notability she had not met. Herself part of the panoply of the world, why now was she intrigued by books which, whatever else they might be, were just a reflection of the world or a version of it? Books? She had seen the real thing.
"I read, I think," she said to Norman, "because one has a duty to find out what people are like," a trite enough remark of which Norman took not much notice, feeling himself under no such obligation and reading purely for pleasure, not enlightenment, though part of the pleasure was the enlightenment, he could see that. But duty did not come into it.
To someone with the background of the Queen, though, pleasure had always taken second place to duty. If she could feel she had a duty to read then she could set abut it with a clear conscience, with the pleasure, if pleasure there was incidental. But why did it take possession of her now? This she did not discuss with Norman, as she felt it had to do with who she was and the position she occupied.
The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something lofty about literature. Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic. Actually she had heard this phrase, the republic of letters, used before, at graduation ceremonies, honorary degrees and the like, though without knowing quite what it meant. At that time talk of a republic of any sort she had thought mildly insulting and in her actual presence tactless to say the least. It was only now she understood what it meant. Books did not defer. All readers were equal, and this took her back to the beginning of her life. As a girl, one of her greatest thrills had been on VE nights, when she and her sister had slipped out of the gates and mingled unrecognised with the crowds. There was something of that, she felt, to reading. It was anonymous; it was shared; it was common. And she who had led a life apart now found that she craved it. Here in these pages and between these covers she could go unrecognised.
These doubts and self-questionings, though, were just the beginning. Once she got into her stride it ceased to seem strange to her that she wanted to read, and books, to which she had taken so cautiously, gradually came to be her element.
♥ When they arrived at the palace she had a word with Grant, the young footman in charge, who said that while ma'am had been in the Lords the sniffer dogs had been round and security had confiscated the book. He thought it had probably been exploded.
"Exploded?" said the Queen. "But it was Anita Brookner."
The young man, who seemed remarkably undeferential, said security may have thought it was a device.
The Queen said: "Yes. That is exactly what it is. A book is a device to ignite the imagination."
The footman said: "Yes, ma'am."
♥ It transpired that with no prior notification to her attendants the Queen had abandoned her long-standing lines of inquiry - length of service, distance travelled, place of origin - and had embarked on a new conversational gambit, namely, "What are you reading at the moment?" To this very few of Her Majesty's loyal subjects had a ready answer (though one did try: "The Bible?"). Hence the awkward pauses which the Queen tended to fill by saying, "I'm reading...", sometimes even fishing in her handbag and giving them a glimpse of the lucky volume. Unsurprisingly the audiences got longer and more ragged, with a growing number of her loving subjects going away regretting that they had not performed well and feeling, too, that the monarch had somehow bowled them a googly.
Off duty, Piers, Tristram, Giles and Elspeth, all the Queen's devoted servants, compare notes:
"What are you reading? I mean, what sort of question is tha? Most people, poor dears, aren't reading anything. Except if they say that, madam roots in her handbag, fetches our some volume she's just finished and makes them a present of it."
"Which they promptly sell on eBay."
"Quite. And have you been on a royal visit recently?" one of the ladies-in-waiting chips in. "Because the word has got round. Whereas once upon a time the dear people would fetch along the odd daffodil or a bunch of mouldy old primroses which Her Majesty then passed back to us bringing up the rear, nowadays they fetch along books they're reading, or, wait for it, even writing, and if you're unlucky enough to be in attendance you practically need a trolley. If I'd wanted to cart books around I'd have got a job in Hatchards. I'm afraid Her Majesty is getting to be what is known as a handful."
Still, the equerries accommodated, and disgruntled though they were at having to vary their routine, in the light of the Queen's new predilection her attendants reluctantly changed tack and in their pre-presentation warm-up now suggested that while Her Majesty might, as of old, still inquire as to how far the presenter had come and by what means, these days she was more likely to ask what the person was currently reading.
♥ "Why should the public care what I am reading? The Queen reads. That is all they need to know. 'So what?' I imagine the general response."
"To read is to withdraw. To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it," said Sir Kevin, "if the pursuit itself were less... selfish."
"Selfish?"
"Perhaps I should say solipsistic."
"Perhaps you should."
Sir Kevin plunged on. "Were we able to harness your reading to some larger purpose - the literacy of the nation as a whole, for instance, the improvement of reading standards among the young..."
"One reads for pleasure," said the Queen. "It is not a public duty."
"Perhaps," said Sir Kevin, "it should be."
"Bloody cheek," said the duke when she told him that night.
♥ That the Queen could readily switch from showbiz autobiography to the last days of a suicidal poet might seem both incongruous and wanting in perception. But, certainly in her early days, to her all books were the same and, as with her subjects, she felt a duty to approach them without prejudice. For her, there was no such thing as an improving book. Books were uncharted country and, to begin with at any rate, she made no distinction between them. With time came discrimination, but apart from the occasional word from Norman, nobody told her what to read, and what not. Lauren Bacall, Winifred Holtby, Sylvia Plath - who were they? Only by reading could she find out.
♥ It was Henry James she was reading one teatime when she said out loud, "Oh, do get on."
The maid, who was just taking away the tea trolley, said, "Sorry, ma'am," and shot out of the room in two seconds flat.
"Not you, Alice," the Queen called after her, even going to the door. "Not you."
Previously she wouldn't have cared what the maid thought or that she might have hurt her feelings, only now she did and coming back to the chair she wondered why. That this access of consideration might have something to do with books and even with the perpetually irritating Henry James did not at that moment occur to her.
♥ It was exciting to be with writers she had come to think of as her friends and whom she longed to know. But now, when she was aching to declare her fellow feeling with those whose books she had read and admired, she found she had nothing to say. She, who had seldom in her life been intimidated by anyone, now found herself tongue-tied and awkward. "I adored your book," would have said it all, but fifty years of composure and self-possession plus half a century of understatement stood in the way. Hard put for conversation, she found herself falling back on some of her stock stand-bys. It wasn't quite "How far did you have to come?" but their literary equivalent. "How do you think of your characters? Do you work regular hours? Do you use a word-processor?" - questions which she knew were cliché and were embarrassing to inflict had the awkward silence not been worse.
One Scottish author was particularly alarming. Asked where his inspiration came from, he said fiercely: "It doesn't come, Your Majesty. You have to go out and fetch it."
♥ "About my Christmas broadcast."
"Yes, ma'am?" said the prime minister.
"I thought this year one might do something different."
"Different, ma'am?"
"Yes. If one were to be sitting on a sofa reading or, even more informally, be discovered by the camera curled up with a book, the camera could creep in - is that the expression? - until I'm in mid-shot, when I could look up and say, 'I've been reading this book about such and such,' and then go on from there."
"And what would the book be, ma'am?" The prime minister looked unhappy.
"That one would have to think about."
"Something about the state of the world perhaps?" He brightened.
"Possibly, though they get quite enough of that from the newspapers. No. I was actually thinking of poetry."
"Poetry, ma'am?" He smiled thinly.
"Thomas Hardy, for instance. I read an awfully good poem of his the other day about how the Titanic and the iceberg that was to sink her came together. It's called 'The Convergence of the Twain.' Do you know it?"
"I don't, ma'am. But how would it help?"
"Help whom?"
"Well" - and the prime minister seemed a trifle embarrassed actually to have to say it - "the people."
"Oh, surely," said the Queen, "it would show, wouldn't it, that fate is something to which we are all subject."
She gazed at the prime minister, smiling helpfully. He looked down at his hands.
"I'm not sure that is a message the government would feel able to endorse." The public must not be allowed to think the world could not be managed. That way lay chaos. Or defeat at the polls, which was the same thing.
"I'm told" - and now it was his turn to smile helpfully - "that there is some excellent footage of Your Majesty's visit to South Africa."
♥ Still, though reading absorbed her, what the queen had not expected was the degree to which it drained her of enthusiasm for anything else. It's true that at the prospect of opening yet another swimming-baths her heart didn't exactly leap up, but even so, she had never actually resented having to do it. However tedious her obligations had been - visiting this, conferring that - boredom had never come into it. This was her duty and when she opened her engagement book every morning it had never been without interest or expectation.
No more. Now she surveyed the unrelenting progression of tours, travels and undertakings stretching years into the future only with dread. There was scarcely a day she could call her own and never two. Suddenly it had all become a drag. "Ma'am is tired," said her maid, hearing her groan at her desk. "It's time ma'am put her feet up occasionally."
But it wasn't that. It was reading, and love it though she did, there were times when she wished she had never opened a book and entered into other lives. It had spoiled her. Or spoiled her for this, anyway.
♥ ..he had proved a mine of information about Proust, who had hitherto just been a name to the Queen. To the foreign secretary she was not even that, and so she was able to fill him in a little.
"Terrible life, poor man. A martyr to asthma, apparently, and really someone to whom one would have wanted to say, 'Oh do pull your socks up.' But literature's full of those. The curious thing about him was that when he dipped his cake in his tea (disgusting habit) the whole of his past life came back to him. Well, I tried it and it had no effect on me at all. The real treat when I was a child was Fuller's cakes. I suppose it might work with me if I were to taste one of them, but of course they've long since gone out of business, so no memories there. Are we finished?" She reached for her book.
♥ In fact, though, the tour, or at least the beginning of it, turned out to be disastrous. The Queen was bored, uncooperative and glum, shortcomings all of which her equerries would readily have blamed on her reading, were it not for the fact that, on this occasion, she had no reading, the books Norman had packed for her having unaccountably gone missing. Dispatched from Heathrow with the royal party, they turned up months later in Calgary, where they were made the focus of a nice if rather eccentric exhibition at the local library. In the meantime, though, Her Majesty had nothing to occupy her mind and rather than focusing her attention on the job in hand, which had been Sir Kevin's intention in arranging for the books' misdirection, being at a loose end just made her bad-tempered and difficult.
In the far north what few polar bears could be assembled hung about waiting for Her Majesty, but when she did not appear loped off to an ice floe that held more promise. Logs jammed, glaciers slid into the freezing waters, all unobserved by the royal visitor, who kept to her cabin.
"Don't you want to look at the St Lawrence Seaway?" said her husband.
"I opened it fifty years ago. I don't suppose it's changed."
♥ "Can there be any greater pleasure," she confided in her neighbour, the Canadian minister for overseas trade, "than to come across an author one enjoys and then to find they have written not just one book or two, but at least a dozen?"
♥ That the Queen was not more troubled by Norman's sudden departure might seem surprising and to reflect poorly on her character. But sudden absences and abrupt departures had always been a feature of her life. She was seldom told, for instance, when anyone was ill; distress and even fellow feeling something that being Queen entitled her to be without, or so her courtiers thought. When, as unfortunately happened, death did claim a servant or even sometimes a friend, it was often the first time that the Queen had heard that anything was amiss, "We mustn't worry Her Majesty" a guiding principle for all her servants.
Norman of course had not died, just gone to the University of East Anglia, though, as the equerries saw it, this was much the same thing, as he had gone from Her Majesty's life and thus no longer existed, his name never mentioned by the Queen or anyone else. But the Queen should not be blamed on that score, on that the equerries agreed; the Queen should never be blamed. People died, people left and (more and more) people got into the papers. For her they were all departures of one sort or another. They left but she went on.
♥ "One recipe for happiness is to have no sense of entitlement." To this she added a star and noted at the bottom of the page: "This is not a lesson I have ever been in a position to learn."
"I was giving the CH once, I think it was to Anthony Powell, and we were discussing bad behaviour. Notably well behaved himself and even conventional, he remarked that being a writer didn't excuse one from being a human being. Whereas (one didn't say this) being Queen does. I have to seem like a human being all the time, but I seldom have to be one. I have people to do that for me."
♥ The librarian at Windsor had been one of many who had urged on Her Majesty the charms of Jane Austen, but being told on all sides how much ma'am would like her put ma'am off altogether. Besides she had handicaps as a reader of Jane Austen that were peculiarly her own. The essence of Jane Austen lies in minute social distinctions, distinctions which the Queen's unique position made it difficult for her to grasp. There was such a chasm between the monarch and even her grandest subject that the social differences beyond that were somewhat telescoped. So the social distinctions of which Jane Austen made so much seemed of even less consequence to the Queen than they did to the ordinary reader, thus making the novels much harder going. To begin with at any rate Jane Austen was practically a work of entomology, the characters not quite ants but seeming to the royal reader so much alike as to require a microscope. It was only as she gained in understanding both of literature and of human nature that they took on individuality and charm.
Feminism, too, got short shift, at least to begin with and for the same reason, the separations of gender like the differences of class was nothing compared with the gulf that separated the Queen from the rest of humanity.
But whether it was Jane Austen or feminism or even Dostoevsky the Queen eventually got round to it and to much else besides, but never without regret. Years ago she had sat next to Lord David Cecil at a dinner in Oxford and had been at a loss for conversation. He, she found, had written books on Jane Austen and these days she would have relished the encounter. But Lord David was dead and so it was too late. Too late. It was all too late. But she went on, determined as ever and always trying to catch up.
♥ Urbane and exquisitely mannered though he is, the equerry is essentially only a stage manager; always aware when deference is due he (or occasionally she) knows, too, that this is a performance and he is in charge of it, with Her Majesty playing the leading role.
The audience or the spectators - and where the Queen is concerned everyone is a spectator - know that it is a performance, while liking to tell themselves that it isn't, quite, and to think, performance notwithstanding, that they have occasionally caught a glimpse of behaviour that is more "natural", more "real" - the odd overheard remark, for instance ("I could murder a gin and tonic," from the late Queen Mother, "Bloody dogs," from the Duke of Edinburgh), or the Queen sitting down at a garden party and thankfully kicking off her shoes. In truth, of course, these supposedly unguarded moments are just as much a performance as the royal family at its most hieratic. This show, or sideshow, might be called playing at being normal and is as contrived as the most formal public appearance, even though those who witness or overhear it think that this is the Queen and her family at their most human and natural. Formal or informal, it is all part of that self-presentation in which the equerries collaborate and which, these apparently impromptu moments apart, is from the public's point of view virtually seamless.
♥ The equerry, with whom she'd never shared such confidences before and who ought to have been flattered, simply felt awkward and embarrassed. This was a truly human side to the monarch of which he'd never been previously aware and which (unlike its counterfeit versions) he did not altogether welcome. And whereas the Queen herself thought that such feelings probably arose out of her reading books, the young man felt it might be that she was beginning to show her age. Thus it was that the dawn of sensibility was mistaken for the onset of senility.
♥ Eventually Sir Kevin got a call from the special adviser.
"Your employer has been giving my employer a hard time."
"Yes?"
"Yes. Lending him books to read. That's out of order."
"Her Majesty likes reading."
"I like having my dick sucked. I don't make the prime minister do it."
♥ And it had been a distinguished life, too, with a good war in which the young Pollington won several medals and commendations for bravery, serving finally on the general staff.
"I've served three queens," he was fond of saying, "and got on with them all. The only queen I could never get on with was Field Marshal Montgomery."
♥ "Had you invested any pursuit with similar fervour eyebrows must have been raised."
"They might. But then one has spent one's life not raising eyebrows. One feels sometimes that that is not much of a boast."
♥ She was often tempted to fall asleep, as with her job who wouldn't be, but now, rather than wake the old man she just waited, listening to his laboured breathing and wondering how long it would be before infirmity overtook her and she became similarly incapable. Sir Claude had come with a message, she understood that and resented it, but perhaps he was a message in his own person, a portent of the unpalatable future.
♥ This was a voice, she thought, as a boy played the clarinet: Mozart, a voice everybody in the hall knew and recognised though Mozart had been dead two hundred years. And she remembered Helen Schlegel in Howards End putting pictures to Beethoven at the concert in the Queen's Hall that Forster describes, Beethoven's another voice that everyone knew.
The boy finished, the audience applauded and, clapping too, she leaned over towards another of the party as if sharing her appreciation. But what she wanted to say was that, old as she was, renowned as she was, no one knew her voice. And in the car taking them back she suddenly said: "I have no voice."
..the novel she had once found slow now seemed refreshingly brisk, dry still but astringently so, with Dame Ivy's no-nonsense tone reassuringly close to hew own. And it occurred to her (as next day she wrote down) that reading was, among other things, a muscle and one that she had seemingly developed. She could read the novel with ease and great pleasure, laughing at remarks (they were hardly jokes) that she had not even noticed before. And through it all she could hear the voice of Ivy Compton-Burnett, unsentimental, severe and wise. She could hear her voice as clearly as earlier in the evening she had heard the voice of Mozart. She closed the book. And once again she said out loud: "I have no voice."
And somewhere in West London where these things are recorded a transcribing and expressionless typist thought it was an odd remark and said as if in reply: "Well, if you don't, dear, I don't know who does."
♥ In the darkness it came to the Queen that, dead, she would exist only in the memories of people. She who had never been subject to anyone would now be on a par with everybody else. Reading could not change that - though writing might.
Had she been asked if reading had enriched her life she would have had to say yes, undoubtedly, though adding with equal certainty that it had at the same time drained her life of all purpose. Once she had been a self-assured single-minded woman knowing where her duty lay and intent on doing it for as long as she was able. Now all too often she was in two minds. Reading was not doing, that had always been the trouble. And old thought she was she was still a doer.
She switched the light on again and reached for her notebook and wrote: "You don't put your life into your books. You find it there."
♥ "Books are wonderful, aren't they?" she said to the vice-chancellor, who concurred.
"At the risk of sound like a piece of steak," she said, "they tenderise one. ..I wonder," she turned to her other neighbour, "whether as professor of creative writing you would agree that if reading softens one up, writing does the reverse. To write you have to be tough, do you not?" Surprised to find himself discussing his own subject, the professor was momentarily at a loss. ..No one was going to tell her, she thought. Writing, like reading, was something she was going to have to do on her own.
♥ ..Sir Kevin came into his office in the morning to find his desk cleared. Though Norman's stint at the university had been advantageous Her Majesty did not like being deceived, and though the real culprit was the prime minister's special adviser Sir Kevin carried the can. Once it would have brought him to the block; these days it brought him a ticket back to New Zealand and an appointment as high commissioner. It was the block but it took longer.
♥ "Don't let's get carried away," said Her Majesty. "Though it is true one is eighty and this is a sort of birthday party. But quite what there is to celebrate I'm not sure. I suppose one of the few things to be said for it is that one has at least achieved an age at which one can die without people being shocked."
There was polite laughter at this and the Queen herself smiled. "I think," she said, "that more shouts of 'No, No' might be appropriate."
So somebody obliged and there was more complacent laughter as the nation's most distinguished tasted the joys of being teased by the nation's most eminent.
♥ "One has had, as you all know, a long reign. In fifty years and more I have gone through, I do not say seen off" - (laughter) - "ten prime minsters, six archbishops of Canterbury, eight speakers and, though you may not consider this a comparable statistic, fifty-three corgis - a life, as Lady Bracknell says, crowded with incident. ..At eighty things do not occur; they recur."
♥ "But then the books, as I'm sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action. Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already. You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated. A book, as it were, closes the book."
♥ "I would have thought," said the prime minister, "that Your Majesty was above literature."
"Above literature?" said the Queen. "Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity. But, as I say, my purpose is not primarily literary: analysis and reflection. What about those ten prime ministers?" She smiled brightly. "There is much to reflect on there. One has seen the country go to war more times than I like to recall. That, too, bears thinking about."
♥ "One has met and indeed entertained many siting heads of state, some of them unspeakable crooks and blackguards and their wives not much better,. This at least raised some rueful nods.
"One has given one's white-gloved hand to hands that were steeped in blood and conversed politely with men who have personally slaughtered children. One has waded through excrement and gore; to be Queen, I have often thought the one essential item of equipment a pair of thigh-length boots.
"One is often said to have a fund of common sense but that's another way of saying that one doesn't have much else and accordingly, perhaps, I have at the instance of my various governments been forced to participate if only passively in decisions I consider ill-advised and often shameful. Sometimes one has felt like a scented candle, sent in to perfume a regime, or aerate a policy, monarchy these days just a government-issue deodorant.
"I am the Queen and head of the Commonwealth, but there have been many times in the last fifty years when that has made me feel not pride but shame. However" - and here she stood up - "we must not lose our sense of priorities and this is a party after all, so before I continue shall we now have some champagne?"