Rita marks the Queen’s 60th coronation anniversary with an extraordinary confession involving an old-fashioned loo, a taste for lead, and Her Majesty’s nose…
The most irritating thing about being a Brit in America is the expectation that I must be as enamored of the Royal family as Americans are. Except in the mind of Justice Antonin Scalia, Americans seem to have put resentment of King George III firmly behind them. The Royals can do no wrong, except perhaps an occasional sartorial indiscretion, which only makes them more lovable. Princess Bea’s horrid hat and Prince Harry’s naked cavorting are cases in point. Americans have followed all the ups and downs of royal news from Charles and Diana to Will and Kate like a long running soap opera. Even better than Downton Abbey. This year brings a perfect storm of royal hysteria with the impending birth of a new heir and the Queen’s 60-year coronation anniversary celebration. Once again I am called upon to join in the gushing adulation and answer questions as a presumed expert on all things royal. Perhaps it is proof that I have remained English to the core that I can do so only with a heavy dose of ironic detachment.
I was a teenager in the 1960’s when all the old values of empire, duty, king, and country came under assault. It was the age of satire. The comedy news show “That Was The Week That Was” shaped my worldview (I had a crush on David Frost). My father, whose oft-repeated admonition was “if you can’t say anything good about someone, say nothing,” nevertheless unreservedly called the Royal family “parasites.” He thought the money expended on the Royals should be used to help the poor. Years later I detected the same tone of uncompromising invective in the Symbionese Liberation Army’s sinister phrase “the insect that preys on the life of the people.” My mother was Belgian so she had no strong feelings for or against the British Royals and never displayed any particular feeling for her own King Baudouin. I remember the Queen being a figure of fun in my household. We listened to the traditional Christmas radio address just to laugh at her strained hoity-toity accent. My school friends and I joked about growing up to marry Prince Charles (we were the exact same age) and what a dreadful fate that would be. Among university students the Royals were regarded as an embarrassing anachronism surely soon to be swept away. I was never really around anyone who loved the Royal family until I crossed the pond to this former rebellious colony.
So for those who would like to know if I have memories of the Coronation sixty years ago, the answer is yes, I do. But they may not be the kind of memories you imagined. I didn’t watch the pageantry on television; we didn’t have one. And I wasn’t taken up to London to join the throngs cheering the new Queen in the streets. At five years old I was considered too young for such an expedition. Surprisingly, my father did go up to London on his own leaving my sister and I at home with our mother. Perhaps his anti-monarchy opinions had not yet hardened. I remember him coming home bringing us little Union Jacks as mementos and telling my mother about the huge crowds.
But my strongest memory of the coronation could perhaps best be dubbed The Unfortunate Case of the Queen’s Nose. For the one and only time in my life I won a competition, a coloring competition in a children’s magazine. I’ve never been able to draw anything much more artistic than a stick figure, but as a meek obedient child I was very good at coloring neatly inside the lines. To celebrate the coronation the magazine invited children to color a picture of the Queen’s coach in royal procession. I can remember just how I bent over the page with my freshly sharpened coloring pencils and meticulously filled in each area of the scene. A few weeks later a surprise package came for me in the post. I had won first place! My prize was a commemorative book about the coronation and a plaster bust of the Queen. But that is not the end of the story…
A couple of years later we moved into our new council house and somehow the bust of the Queen ended up on the upstairs windowsill just outside the loo. Perhaps it is a measure of how little she was treasured that we didn’t put her on prominent display in the living room or even among the religious iconography in my bedroom. (I was terrified of the picture of my patron saint, St. Rita, shown with blood dripping down her face from the Crown of Thorns). No, the Queen was relegated to the unofficial loo waiting area. A large family with one loo we often found ourselves impatiently hanging about on the landing awaiting our turn. The loo was the old kind with a tank up at ceiling height, which sounded like Niagara Falls when flushed, a welcome signal that our turn was up. So I spent many idle moments lolling about with my elbows leaning on the windowsill, and it happened that in this position the Queen’s nose was just about at mouth level. ow it started I don’t know, but once I had the first taste of the sweetish plaster I was hooked. No doubt it contained lead. I would nibble at the nose a little bit each time I waited there. I don’t know if any of my siblings ever partook of the royal nose. Perhaps it was all my doing. By the time I left home the Queen’s bust looked like one of those Ancient Egyptian sculptures with the noses broken off. Whenever I came home over the years, there she was, a reminder of my puzzling youthful addiction and flagrant lack of respect for my sovereign.
Now I’ve made this confession I hope the statute of limitations has passed and I won’t be charged as a traitor to the Royal family when I next visit England. I remember hearing that if you stuck a postage stamp on a letter with the Queen’s head upside down you could be arrested. Surely consuming the Queen’s nose is worse. But rounding up traitors for such symbolic crimes sounds more like something that would have happened in the reign of the first Elizabeth. I am sure if I had eaten her nose I would have been hung, drawn, and quartered.
On the other hand, since Americans love the Queen so much, maybe I am no longer safe here in her former colony.
Rita Byrne Tull is an ex-pat librarian who lives in Maryland.
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23 thoughts on “A Royal Pain or, The Unfortunate Case of the Queen’s Nose”
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I do actually sometime notice hints of this interest in the British royal family, but it is rare enough to be a surprise. In 1979 (was it?) a co-worker, a Midwestern feminist, said that she rose in the dark hours to watch the royal wedding. And then some years later another co-worker spoke of getting a phone call from a friend who was greatly distressed by Princess Diana’s death (this co-worker didn’t much care). Two instances I can recall in 35 years hardly counts as a great deal of interest in the British royalty over here. Perhaps it requires speaking with a British accent to bring out the Anglophiles, and my own voice is flat Midwestern.
I imagine though, that the UK is well and truly stuck with the Windsors. I suppose that they are good for tourism and for tabloids. Never having looked into the economics of advertising, I can’t guess whether they are cost effective or not.
” I suppose that they are good for tourism and for tabloids”
Tourists and Red Tops be damned.
If you come from one of those countries where the state or its representatives is liable to knick your property – Venezuela, Russia or France for example – or where stability and lack of coups, revolutions and civil war is a rarity – the Middle East, Russia or France, etc. – or where invasion is a regular occurence – China, Russia or France, etc. – then the monarchy is a massive signal saying ‘We don’t go in for that sort of thing here’, or, as it can be transleted, ‘Park your money here and happily do business with us stable and law-abiding chaps’.
That is worth a fortune.
So this is why Gerard Depardieu is moving to Belgium, since the monarchy there indicates that he is safe from confiscatory taxes?
Not at all. Its just that Gerard ate everything in France and so has to move to a new food supply. Rather like a swarm of locusts.
The latest I heard was that he’s cleaned the Belgians out of moules-frites and was off to Russia for a crack at the stroganov.
Yes, and nobody you know watches Downton Abbey and soccer is for wusses and the Beatles were actually American etc etc.
1. Alas, I’ve met a Downton Abbey viewer or two. One at least is expected to recover.
2. Soccer is for them as grew up with it, not unlike the monarchy, mushy peas, and cricket–though actually most of the soccer fans I know are from Central and South America.
3. Depends on the cetera, no?
Mushy peas! Oh now there is something I do miss. Yorkshire caviar as the ads used to call them.
Heh. Maybe the Jesuits were right about getting them young. When I was eight, HM was visiting Canada to open the St. Lawrence Seaway. One afternoon, I came home from playing some games, hoping to relax with some afternoon television, but it was all the royal tour. As it has been thus for many days, I groaned to my mother, who had been glued and riveted throughout, “Is she on again?” Bad career move. I received a very loud “proper dressing down” for talking about “my Queen” that way. Perhaps all those royal picture books that littered our living room should have clued me in.
My soul having been thus captured, I spent several disheartening decades trying with steadily depleting gusto to defend the monarchy. I became very adroit at arguing the political advantages of constitutional monarchy while hiding any hint I just thought the Queen looked lovely. The era of traditional, defiant “we should feed the poor instead” republicanism slowly gave way to an amused and distanced consensus that such fairy tales ill-befitted a modern progressive people and were more suitable for the types who like monster truck rallies. Aided by the young royals, it all became a national bore not even worth fighting against. Getting agitated over it was something mercurial Aussies did, not calm and thoughtful Canadians. The monarchy became the cause of isolated eccentrics with shrines to the Queen in their basements. Like progressive Protestantism, the whole show seemed destined to dribble away in a fit of absence of mind. HM herself remained an icon, of course, but King Chuck?
Then came Will & Kate’s 2011 honeymoon tour and the whole country went absolutely bonkers. Huge cheering crowds of starstruck youth and their adoring elders who had waited for hours were complemented by learned op-eds on the strengths of monarchy compared to the dysfunctional republicanism of you-know-who. The slightest criticism was shouted down and politicans rushed to assure they country they were cavaliers at heart. It was one of the greatest schadenfreude moments of my life to see my leftist friends try to hind their visceral disgust at yet another reversal of the course of history under a veneer of distance and bemusement.
So, Rita, long may she reign. It was a great post, but you have left me wondering whether your grandchildren and great-grandchildren will view the tale of when Grannie ate the Queen’s nose as a shameful family secret not to be discussed in polite company, and will tell their own children not to speak of “their Queen” that way.
As I noted in my Diary a little while back, when I was an earnest republican in my student days I would never have believed that by 2013 the monarchy would be stronger than ever and it would be republicanism that is the quaint anachronism, but it surely is.
There are no good arguments now for Britain becoming a republic. The main one made by sandal-wearing Lib Dem/Polly Toynbee types is that it stands as a symbol for and thereby promotes inequality and privilege. But to counter this one need only point out that all their fave ‘equal’ countries are monarchies (Sweden, Denmark, Holland, Belgium) and their most hated, most ‘unequal’ country is the republiciest republic of them all.
Back in the UK I was always a rock solid republican. Now I’m here in the former colonies I really ought not to give a bugger. But see, I’m more staunchly opposed to the royals than I’ve ever been. At least in public in answer to those endless questions. Just to wind everyone up. Deep in my heart I’m a staunch Yorkshireman and honestly lass I don’t think we’ve a lot of time for ’em either way.
Yorkshiremen are a bit of a quaint anachronism too.
Tha’s lookin’ for a clout our kid!
Eh. Foreign countries allow us to indulge in the simplest and most emotionally satisfying form of conservatives: no-changism. No one (well, almost no one) wants the Windsors any where near our government, but since you have them, you should keep them.
European-style monarchy is reasonable without being rational and human rationality is often over-rated. Incidentally, I met the Princess of Wales yesterday. She seemed very nice and very tall.
I have it on good authority (ie, from someone who has met her) that the Queen is “tiny and lovely”.
Is there an incumbent Princess of Wales? I thought that the Prince’s consort was fobbed off with a lesser title?
Well that proves it, I’m calling you out this time, George. That feigned indifference above is foolin’ nobody. You’ve got a glass cabinet full of china Charles and Diana wedding memorabilia and a shrine to Camilla in your downstairs loo, haven’t you?
Oh yes. I meant the Duchess of Cambridge.
Frank, I think the main point of interest in meeting someone off the telly is how tall they are in real life.
Indeed. My brother once encountered Mick Jagger, and was surprised at how (comparatively) diminutive he was.
Bob Geldof recalls one of his daughters, then very small, being introduced to the real Princess of Wales at Live Aid. “Your head looks much bigger than it does on the telly,” whispers Fifi Trixiebelle, or perhaps the other one. “Don’t worry, there’s nothing in it.” says HRH.
Apart from Julie Burchill and a few Express readers in I don’t know Knutsford we seem to have pretty much forgotten that woman. I loved her immoderately, though I was never sure whether that made me a monarchist or something else.
We went on holiday to Sri Lanka just after Diana died. Strangers came up to us having heard our English and, head bowed, told us how deeply sorry they were for our loss. It was a very peculiar feeling – one couldn’t help but be moved.
Americans have followed all the ups and downs of royal news from Charles and Diana to Will and Kate like a long running soap opera.
That sentence would be a lot more accurate if you replaced “Americans” with “American women”.
Straight men would have to be in a permanent post-vegetative state to care less about royal news than they already do.