First, an observation and caveat. Trying to write or do a podcast while suffering the lingering effects of Covid is hard. My brain was already rebelling against the idea of further productivity in the weeks after finally completing my book. Then came the second and third blows: my longstanding hypothesis that I possess coronavirus super-immunity was disproven, and the virus kicked off my third bout of inner-ear problems in as many months, making normal life a nausea-ridden, vertiginous minefield.
But I’m still standing - just about - and I don’t want these depredations to be the coup de grace to Wednesday’s Ghost or anything else. So I fight on, perhaps with less energy and less coherence but with every ounce of commitment I can muster.
I have a diary from the backpack journey that I took round Europe in the early 1990s. The first volume opens with a descent through layers of cloud, the mist parting in the moments before landing to reveal a green and pleasant land. I was 22, on a 20-dollar-a-day budget, wearing the one pair of shoes that would get me through the next two months: weatherbeaten, ill-fitting boots from the Army & Navy surplus store.
I felt at home with what I found in London. ‘All these people clad in black here - really incredible,’ I wrote on the 4th of September, 1992. ‘I blend well. People ask me for directions on the Tube.’ I went to Highgate Cemetery a week later and proclaimed I wanted to live there. Mobile phones barely existed, and instead everyone clutched books: working their way through nonfiction tomes on public transport, perusing novels while walking along the street, enjoying a few stanzas of poetry in leafy Bloomsbury squares. I scribbled enthusiastically in an antique spiral-bound notebook, bound in deep-green fake lizard skin and embossed with ‘Daily Budget or Tax Records’ on the front. ‘The men here are incomparable,’ I wrote.
Eventually, I did find a way to compare them. Seven years later I was landing on English soil again, trembling with excitement about seeing my fiancé, the first of three British men I would marry. Despite being engaged to him, I knew him so slightly that I struggled to recognise him at the airport. We’d met on a ski slope in Canada and had a couple of dates - it was before social media or smartphones with cameras, and after I went home, I had no record of what he looked like. He was just a voice on the telephone that asked me to marry him a few weeks after my return from holiday, and for reasons I can’t account for now, I said yes.
At last count, I am averaging one marriage for each decade of my life in the UK. The first decade was the strangest, and the most royal.
After 30-plus years, I’m able to think independently: I grasp the context, know my own mind. I’m familiar with this society and its nuances, and even if I wanted to, I’d be too chicken to hang out British-flag bunting or get out the big projector screen for the coronation tomorrow - in my neighbourhood, it’s not the done thing. There’s a street party in the offing, but I notice on the WhatsApp chat that many people are slightly apologetic about it, or at least tend to qualify their anticipation. No God Save the King!! or Rule Britannia!! here, just comments about how it’s nice to have an excuse to get the street together, share food, inflate a bouncy castle. This is East London, and you can’t swing a Sword of State without hitting a fair few anti-monarchist republicans.
In my 20s, however, havning no inkling of any of this, I didn't know anything, and my fate could have been different. When I met my first British beau for our first date in an apres-ski bar in Canada, he was clad in what I now know what was coded clothing: scarlet 8-wale cordoroy trousers, canary-yellow socks, Gucci loafers with horsebit hardware, Oxford checked shirt, gold signet pinky ring. I thought he was an eccentric dresser, that’s all; I didn’t realise that every sartorial element pointed to an item on his curriculum vitae: class, education, politics, even his leisure pursuits. I only began to understand this when, on one of my first weekends in England as an engaged person, I was taken to a party in a country house. To my astonishment, every man in attendance wore the same uniform, varying only in the colour of the trousers, the symbols engraved on the signet rings. Everyone talked of horses and rode to hounds.
The home was unpretentious, its furniture dirtied and torn by the toenails of many dogs, its hallways filled with muddy Wellington boots. Peacocks trailed round the lawns and flapped up onto the thatched roof, where they perched like unhinged weather vanes, screeching. But the art on the walls looked old and expensive, and formal photos of family weddings, framed in heavy silver, were dotted round the drawing room on sideboards and pianos. Not sure where to place myself or how to talk to my hosts or fellow guests, I paced around scrutinising them. To my surprise, as far from home as I was, most of the images contained people I recognised. Princess Diana. Prince Charles. The Queen Mother. The Queen.
Where was I?
Before I emigrated, I’d not varied much from the uniform I wore on my first backpack trip round Europe: combat boots, leather jackets with spikes, hair dyed ridiculous colours. I played rollerblade hockey and broke my nose slam dancing in a mosh pit. In the UK, though, my fiancé took me shopping in Mayfair to get me properly kitted out for my new social life. Unmoored from any social support and any point of reference, away from family, friends, and co-workers, I did everything he said and followed all his advice. I ditched the combat boots. I took lessons in bridge and tennis. I was married in a castle on the Kent coast. I bought huge and expensive hats at Lock & Co. Hatters (est. 1765), some of them in hatboxes large enough to house washing machines.
I wore these confections to unfamiliar occasions and odd parties. Trooping the Colour, the militaristic display in Horse Guards Parade that marks the official birthday of the sovereign. The Royal Household Stands at Ascot, a far cry from Churchill Downs in Kentucky, and full of people with name tags saying ‘Hon’ for Honorable. The assembled crowd lustily sang Rule Britannia and other empire-era hits. There was a polo match, maybe two, I don’t remember. A dinner party at the home of the then Major General, where there were footmen, and an aristocrat confessed to me that he was afraid of moths and other hairy-winged things after I explained to him what a psychologist was, the ladies withdrew from the dining room to the salon so that the men could talk about man things, and the daughter of the Major General invited me to smoke weed. A garden party at Buckingham Palace to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the then Duke of Edinburgh, the father of the soon-to-be-crowned King, heading up the Grenadier Guards. I met the Queen and her consort, and curtsied clumsily.
We were at the latter gathering because my husband had been a Grenadier Guard, an officer, a recipient of the Sword of Honour at Sandhurst. This sword was displayed in our guest bedrooms in Pimlico, and then South Kensington, alongside the brush of a fox killed in the hunt, the tail suspended by a little leather loop from a wood-and-brass plaque bearing the date of its demise, and a photograph of my husband leaping a hedgerow in a point-to-point race. He’d once served as the equerry, or personal secretary, to the Duke of Edinburgh, and he called Prince Philip a ‘dear old thing.’ On the occasion of our marriage, the Palace sent us a congratulatory telegram, which was read out at the reception. I have it somewhere, in a box in the attic.
I only met Charles on one occasion, at a gathering for the landowners over whose territory the Quorn Hunt rode. I wasn’t expecting to see him there and was hastily briefed on protocol. ‘Your Royal Highness’ first, then ‘Sir.’ I didn’t do any of it. He was friendly and smiley and would have been an inch taller than me had I not been wearing heels, and so I looked down upon the future King. He asked me if I hunted, and I burst into laughter. ‘Oh my Lord, no,’ I said.
For this I got into trouble in the cab on the way home.
As time wore on, I became increasingly bored and rebellious. The ‘Hon’ label irritated me. I loathed the protocol, the things I had to wear, the vocabulary I wasn’t allowed to use, even as certain rules sank into my consciousness forever. To this day I can barely bring myself to say a list of words that were expressly forbidden to me then: ‘couch,’ ‘toilet,’ ‘notepaper.’ These and other words were disdained as not upper class, or ‘non-U,’ in Nancy Mitford’s 1950s treatise on the subject, Noblesse Oblige. My then-husband still took these distinctions dreadfully seriously, and after a while, I couldn’t take it anymore.
One early morning, in Melton Mowbray, I found myself standing in a muddy field amongst the horses, holding a heavy silver tray aloft. It was arrayed with mini sausage rolls and glasses of port, and from this tray my husband and his fellow huntsmen and women - already sat astride their mounts, suited and booted - fortified themselves for the exertions ahead. Sod this, I suddenly thought, and I was done.
My ex still rides to hounds, campaigns for the Conservatives, and wears country clothes at weekends, to include the 8-wale cordoroy trousers, I’ve no doubt. Meanwhile, I’ve reverted to the black-clad, cemetery-prowling, book-reading, Doc-Marten-wearing creature I was in 1992. I sold my Lock & Co. hats, all except one, just in case - in case of what, I’m not entirely sure. A seat will never again be saved for me at Trooping the Colour, or the Royal Household Stands at Ascot; I’ll probably never again attend a weekend party at a country house, like the ones that filled my first months and years in the UK.
My ex will probably watch as King Charles and Camilla are crowned, pointing out the faces he recognises in the cathedral to his new wife, his child. For myself, I’m not sure whether I’ll tune in, and in that uncertainty I’m not afraid of judgement from my republican neighbours - it’s not that I’m a Coronation chicken. It’s just that I’ve been there, done that, earned my nonchalance.
Perhaps, with an air of irony reflecting a lack of deep belief in either, I’ll say God save the King. I’ll raise a glass to him, to the hovering ghost of my former life, and to all the paths not taken.
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