Miss Carter's War (15 page)

When the absurdly ornate golden coach appeared, drawn by eight grey feather-bedecked horses, Tony gasped.

‘Those horses have gone a bit over the top with their outfits, haven’t they?’

The others shushed him as they caught their first glimpse of the young Queen, sparkling with diamonds, peeping through the window at the ecstatic crowd waving hankies, doffing their caps, raising Union Jacks and roaring their approval, their gratitude, that something good was happening, a great wave of love flooding over the country, that even lapped at the toes of Tony.

‘It’s a terrible waste of money, but we do do these things bloody well,’ he conceded.

Moira was full of admiration for the handling by the maids in waiting of the Queen’s voluminous gown and long train as she alighted from the rickety steps of the carriage.

‘My God, they must have rehearsed that over and over again.’

When the young woman began the long walk, hands clasped demurely in front of her, down the aisle towards the altar, to spine-tingling shouts of ‘Vivat Regina!’, Miss Allum added her reedy underused voice to the acclaim. ‘Yes, yes, “vivat”, indeed.’

Moira stood and applauded.

‘I couldn’t have done it better myself. Look at that – she’s perfect in the part. Think how terrifying it is. The first time something like this has been seen by millions of us riff-raff.’

It was only afterwards that they discovered that some idiot had laid the carpet back to front, so that the plush pulled back her gown and train, making it doubly difficult to negotiate.

The complicated mysterious rituals were performed, with the solemn young woman at the centre of everything. She was handed an orb, followed by a sword of equity, and then a sceptre. The picture was not clear enough to see quite what happened to the orb, which caused Tony some consternation.

‘Has she got three royal hands, or has she dropped it?’

Mr Humphreys’ voice was surprisingly strong.

‘That’s enough, young man. Show some respect.’

‘Sorry, Mr Humphreys, but I find all this a bit odd in this day and age.’

Marguerite kicked him and whispered, ‘Don’t spoil it.’

He whispered back, ‘I’m surprised at you, Marguerite. The only women involved are glorified dressers, with all the men in frocks and tights doing the important stuff.’

‘OK, but a woman is the boss. She could have their heads chopped off.’

‘Er, I don’t think you have quite grasped the finer points of the English Constitution, you little Froggy person.’

As the Queen was draped in a cloth-of-gold coat, Moira shook her head in wonder.

‘God, the cossies are magnificent.’

But to Marguerite the most moving moment was when the Queen, stripped of her coronet and jewels, her beautiful embroidered satin dress covered by a simple cotton one, sat in solemn stillness as a canopy was pulled over her head under which she was anointed with oil by the Archbishop. So affecting was the ritual that Marguerite momentarily regretted that she was half republican.

When the crown was lowered onto Elizabeth’s head, all six of them rose to their feet and joined in the ‘God save the Queen’s, toasting the television set with their glasses.

‘God bless her, I say. So there!’ shouted Miss Allum, slopping sherry on her lace.

Mr Humphreys, too, was surprisingly loud.

‘Yes indeed – long live the Queen.’

‘These things weigh a ton, you know,’ commented Moira. ‘I had to wear one as the Queen of Spades in panto once, and it nearly broke my neck.’

Moira, by this time carried away by the whole thing, dropped an expert, if slightly wobbly, low curtsy to the television. Mr Humphreys, wide-eyed, offered her a trembling hand when she had slight difficulty getting up. Marguerite realised that Tony was right. The Queen was surrounded by men, ladening her with orb, sword and sceptre, and making vows of allegiance, but the young woman seemed utterly alone. She sat on the uncomfortable Coronation throne, weighed down with the enormous crown, the heavy regalia balanced precariously on her knees, men all round her, and none of them so much as glanced at her to see if she was all right, so intent were they on bowing and scraping and walking backwards.

Marguerite by this stage was just capable of a sniffled, ‘Poor her, she’s so young.’ Even Tony managed a, ‘Bless her little cotton socks.’

Only Mrs Schneider was quiet. When Marguerite asked if she was all right, she replied, ‘I have been remembering mass events in my country. Ugly, manipulative, full of hatred, centred on a vile man. To you, Tony, my dear, this is, how d’you say, anachronistic, I know, but to me this piece of history, with lovely music and pageantry, for what seems to be a good woman, is quite beautiful. You should be proud.’

Looking round, Marguerite could see that this little bunch of disparate loyal subjects, including even Tony at that moment, were. Proud.

Chapter 14

The Coronation affected everyone. Talk of a new Elizabethan age seemed to lighten the mood after the disappointing post-war austerity. The television helped with that. Mrs Schneider bought, on the hire purchase, the set that Tony had rented, for the enjoyment of her tenants. A quiz game,
Double Your Money
, and a talent contest,
Opportunity Knocks
, which allowed the viewers to send in votes for the winner – a process Miss Allum and Mr Humphreys took terribly seriously, never revealing their secret ballot – gave them endless pleasure. They would emerge from their rooms, yet not have to talk to one another, as they gazed in silence at the world outside, through the 14-inch window of ‘the goggle box’.

Tony had a field day every time a politician of any persuasion appeared on the screen. Unlike his heckling at the old public meetings, where he frequently bested the speakers, he now sat in front of ‘the box’ and subjected them to a vicious stream of abuse, of which they were blissfully unaware. Miss Allum usually left the room. Once Churchill was out of the picture, the Tories were to provide Tony with a succession of glorious hate figures. Eden, Macmillan, and eventually Douglas Home. ‘How can those morons be so sodding stupid as to vote in all these obsolete, tight-arsed, ossified, Eton-educated has-beens?’

In the meantime, Marguerite’s disgust with Churchill’s government was more restrained, but she too could not understand how such a progressive idealistic Labour government of eclectic rough diamonds could have been ousted by a lot of public-school Oxbridge gentlemen. When Tony moaned about the government, and the inevitability of ‘tears before bedtime with all this profligacy’ as he called its ‘dash for growth’, Marguerite responded with ‘If you can’t beat ’em join ’em’, insisting on the two of them enjoying the fun while it lasted. And enjoy themselves they did.

Apart from occasional visits to the Embassy Ballroom in Welling to dance to John Dankworth and Ted Heath’s bands, they spent most weekends visiting the West End. A new phenomenon was the coffee bar, a source of great satisfaction to Marguerite, who remembered the smell of the beans being ground by Maman and could now demonstrate to Tony why the bottles of Camp Coffee – revolting brown stuff – bore no resemblance to the real thing, despite his affection for the name.

Tony reluctantly accompanied her to these chrome-and-glass cafés.

‘What’s all this foreign muck? We’re English, I tell you. What’s wrong with a good old British cup of char,’ he would say in his Colonel Blimp voice, shouting over the blaring juke box. Ignoring Johnnie Ray and Perry Como, he would insist on playing Patti Page singing:

How much is that doggie in the window (woof, woof),

The one with the waggy tail (woof, woof) . . .

Getting everyone to join in the ‘woofs’, he would then tell them that the combination of money and inanity made it a song for the times.

At weekends, and in the holidays, they started exploring England on the motorbike, using the new
Good Food Guide
to plan their routes. They stayed in the boarding houses and hotels the guide recommended, and duly sent in their critiques. They would book a double room under Judy’s maiden name, Gumm, Marguerite as Mrs Gumm wearing a curtain ring on her wedding finger. All of the establishments were attempting to up their game, but they were on the whole not succeeding. Marguerite and Tony soon tired of the grapefruit segments and bright pink prawn cocktails, followed by overcooked paper-thin beef, with Bovril gravy, and the inevitable tinned fruit cocktail, but at least some of them were trying, and the infinite variety of the English landscape more than made up for the indifferent food.

Tony succumbed to the improvements in London restaurant cuisine. Instead of their old favourite Lyons Corner House, they both now preferred to eat in the Soup Kitchen, the brainchild of a young entrepreneur Terence Conran, with its earthenware pots, delicious selection of soups and crusty bread, followed by apple tart. They discovered that the exuberant if incompetent staff were mainly aspiring young actors and dancers – students or ‘between jobs’. They persuaded Moira, who had a week off, to go there with them. When Marguerite told their waiter that Moira was a working actress, they all gathered round the table, agog for her advice, expecting some Stanislavsky-type gems. They were not sure whether they were meant to laugh at her ‘Know your lines and don’t bump into the furniture’.

When they went away Moira said, ‘Lucky little buggers. They’ve all got grants to go to drama school. There was no such thing when I was young. Then, when I should have been establishing myself, there was the war. I missed the boat, I’m afraid.’

She stared wistfully at the youngsters by the counter, calling each other ‘darling’ and shrieking with laughter as they frothed the coffee machine, glancing out of the corner of their eyes to see who was watching.

‘I wonder what I could have been, eh?’

Marguerite thought: I don’t know a single person whose life has not been blighted in some way by that bloody war. But she said, ‘Never mind could have been. You are. You are a very good actress.’

Moira laughed.

‘Well, so Mr Humphreys thinks. That’s an irony, isn’t it? I took comfort that at least a critic thinks I’m good. And it turns out to be the pathetic Mr Humphreys. Mrs Schneider told me. Hardly Kenneth Tynan, is he?’

‘No, but he . . .’

‘Life can be pretty bloody sometimes, can’t it?’

There seemed little point in arguing.

Tony took her hand.

‘Yes, Moira, it can. And very unfair.’

‘Oh bugger this for a lark.’

Out came her powder compact, bright red lipstick and the old panache returned.

‘Let’s go for a drink at the Salisbury.’

Here Moira was in her element again. In this flamboyant, if faded, Victorian pub on St Martin’s Lane, she was kissed and hugged and greeted with cries of ‘Darling, you look wonderful’. She told everyone she was helping out at a little rep for a while, before she started ‘a biggy’, which it would be unlucky to talk about. She hung on to Tony possessively, smiling shyly when someone asked if he was ‘her latest’. ‘Her latest’ meantime was eyeing up a graceful young man who was playing a sailor in
South Pacific
at Drury Lane Theatre. When he disappeared, Marguerite knew that she and Moira would be going home alone. Although she had accepted the status quo of their relationship, Marguerite always felt a pang of regret when that happened.

Tony and Marguerite still went on their theatre jaunts together. On a Saturday they would rent a stool for the gallery queue in the morning, go for a walk or to a museum, and then, in the afternoon, return to sit on their stool, entertained by buskers and mad people. Then when the stools were collected, and the doors opened, they would charge up the endless stairs to the top of the theatre, where the show was watched as through the wrong end of a telescope. They judged actors by their ability to hold their head up so that the audience was afforded a glimpse of their face. And, of course, how well they projected their voice. Tony was one of the gallery regulars who would shout ‘Speak up’ if someone was too quiet. Marguerite didn’t like the booing that was often decided on in the interval by the regulars, however well deserved. One Royal Opera House outing, to see
La Traviata
, ended in disaster, when the fog was so bad it infiltrated the auditorium until they couldn’t see the stage at all, and the performance had to be cancelled.

They gave the super-romantic Ivor Novello musicals and boulevard comedies a miss, but became regulars at the Royal Court Theatre in Chelsea, and Theatre Workshop in Stratford East, where the kitchen sink drama spoke to their concerns about society. Tony was grateful to see the working-class world he knew portrayed on a stage. When they saw the angry, frustrated, venomous Jimmy Porter in
Look Back in Anger
, he was dumbfounded.

‘That’s me up there.’

‘A bit butch for you,’ suggested Marguerite.

‘True. I wouldn’t bother with the boring blonde if I were in a room with Alan Bates.’

At school too Marguerite was aware of changes. The girls were more forthcoming in lessons, the lisle stockings were replaced by nylons, and school hats were worn at daring angles, if at all. She was on break duty one lunchtime when she heard raised voices. It was a group of girls who were leaving at the end of term, whom she had cherished and worried over since she started as a teacher, contemporaries of the already departed Elsie and Irene. In the centre of the angry crowd were Pauline and Hazel, the United Nations zealots, having a violent row. Intending to instruct them that politics should be argued rationally, with due respect given to other people’s opinions, she crossed the playground to intervene.