Tucked away in a shoe box here, with other treasures including adolescent love letters, expired passports and Somerset membership cards, is a green leather bookmark embossed with silver print.
The bookmark was given to me in 1977 by my junior school, the Highlands in Tilehurst, to mark the silver jubilee of Queen Elizabeth the Second. The following year, the Queen visited Reading. We were marched out of school to a roadside to see her. It was, to be honest, a somewhat underwhelming experience. She drove past and didn’t even stop to say hello.
It was the only time I saw the Queen in person. And yet she has been a presence during the full fifty years. She has been in the background, in the papers, on stamps and in the inside front cover of my passport requesting various fractious border officials allow me “to pass freely without let or hinderance”.
She has been both there and not there throughout 50 years, and to be honest again, I’ve lived most of those without giving her much thought.
Now, however, she is not there at all, and like many others I am thinking about what she meant to me and to the country, as well as what it means to be without her.
For almost all of us, Elizabeth is the only monarch we have known. The longevity is extraordinary. The longest I have stayed in a job is seven years. The Queen outlasted the school, which closed a decade or so ago. She outlasted all the adolescent romances, of course, but not the cricket club. We have lived the entirety of our lives in the second Elizabethan age.
Her life, however well lived and however dutiful her service, will not define those seven decades. They are likely to be remembered for the Cold War, the arrival of the internet and the relentless march of digital technology, for unprecedented access to travel, for advances in medical treatment, for globalization, for climate change. And scores of other developments, good and bad.
But the Queen lived them all, meeting Eisenhower and Obama, Gorbachev and Putin, McGuinness and Mugabe, Monroe and Sinatra, Attenborough and Berners-Lee, Bobby Moore and Brian Lara. She appointed 15 Prime Ministers, one earlier this week, although it feels like last year.
She was both there and not there. Not taking political decisions, not taking positions even, but helping to facilitate the work of others, providing a reassuring, perhaps even maternal presence on the national and world stage.
And she’s been a presence in our home, even here in Madrid. Downstairs in the kitchen are three commemorative tea caddies, marking her golden, diamond and platinum jubilees. There are mugs and tea towels, there is crystal and china.
In 2012 she came into the house in the most unexpected and unforgettable way, with James Bond! So it seemed she had a sense of humour and fun. I’d never really thought about what she was actually like. While, for better or (mostly) worse the personalities, whims and caprices of every other royal has been turned inside out by a combination of the tabloids and their own PR machines, the Queen has maintained the mystery the monarchy used to consider vital to its survival.
And since 2016 she’s been on Netflix. Not her, of course, but Claire Foy and Olivia Colman. It’s best to treat The Crown as fictional, even if it has taught me some history I hadn’t previously known. But even then, as her grandson Harry said, “loosely it gives you a rough idea about what that lifestyle, the pressures of putting duty and service above family and everything else, what can come from that.”
And understanding that notion of service is very important, as it’s the essence of monarchy in the twenty first century. Every obituary published in the last 24 hours, every tribute references it. As Emmanuel Macron, in a beautifully crafted statement, put it, she was, ‘faithful to the heavy burden of her duties’.
That burden has now been passed on to her son, and the Queen, who has been the one constant in times that have been extraordinarily turbulent, has gone. I’ve seen it written that she was a unifying force, perhaps the only one, in a country that is fragmented by many fault lines: urban and rural; rich and poor; north and south; progressive and conservative; remain and leave. (And it should be pointed out that there are communities in our disunited Kingdom where the Queen and the monarchy she represents are divisive themselves.) So who or what can unite us now?
Of course, there is a new monarch, a King. This alone will take some getting used to. Singing the national anthem for the next five years will be like writing the date in January, remembering too late that it is 2022 and not 2021. Good Save the Que…, er, King.
Charles, a divisive figure for many reasons, inherits the throne and probably some of the goodwill people felt towards his mother. The rest he will have to earn. There are many who have loved and respected the monarch but not necessarily the institution. His challenge will be to unite the two.
Queen Elizabeth’s passing is significant and momentous. I haven’t seen her since 1978, but she was always there. And now she is not.