Into the Blizzard (22 page)

We came to a deep dining room with a piano, a drawing room that holds the Christmas tree, a ladies’ room and ballroom, and a secret hallway door.

On a table in the dining room was a photo of Sir Dighton Probyn, in this very room at dinner in 1910—and I felt that queer sensation of when a photo from the past is positioned in the same location today. I knew a little about the man in the photo. Sir Probyn had dealt with rumours about Prince Albert Victor, eldest son of the Prince of Wales, and his part in the Cleveland Street scandal, which involved homosexual acts at a male brothel at 19 Cleveland Street, London, in the 1880s. I knew this because after Tommy Ricketts received his Victoria Cross, he was introduced, by the King, to Dighton Probyn. And so I had to look Probyn up.

The table in the dining room could support nine extensions. The room had a pale green wall with white moulded ceilings, and a parquet floor.

A painting of birds was being parsed by our guide. Partridge, the guide said, are smaller, so their eggs are hidden, while pheasants lay larger eggs and the squirrels get them. This is why you don’t see eggs in a painting of partridge.

A portable radiator painted pale green stood in the dining room where the Christmas tree would be in December. For some reason, the idea that members of the royal family were kept warm by this portable radiator cheered me up. It was only missing a nest of eggs underneath it.

Finally I struck up my courage to ask what I had come to ask. I found a guard I liked. Her name was Helen Fraser, and as she listened to me I could see her calculate and categorize and finally understand the person I was and the question I had in my mouth. The guards must have memorized all of the questions that are in the mouths of the commonwealth. They were used to providing the unconventional service; you just had to ask for it.

She took me to see Bob. He knows of the room you’re describing, Helen said.

A congenial man of fifty pulled his glasses down to his chin, let them sit there and listened to Helen. His hand unclicked the plush red rope barrier and beckoned me to follow him. We walked down a hall, away from the paying
citizens, to a staircase, and through a door to a small room with one high window. I felt as if someone had allowed me to walk through Stonehenge.

This, Bob said, is the King’s Study.

The room had natural light from a tall window. There was a desk and several portraits of dogs, a kettle and a hot plate. The dogs in the paintings were Borzois. There were bagged lunches on the desk—the clenched rolled top on the paper bag lunches struck me as so new and ephemeral here among the king’s dog portraits—dogs that looked like they hadn’t been stared at in a hundred years. You can feel that, when a painting has been starved for eyes. This is where we have our tea, Bob said.

The room was mostly gutted of original furnishing. There was a clothes rack so the guards could store their coats here. In a glass cabinet were samples of ship’s rigging. On a wall beside the door were brass knobs that might have been used to signal someone in a far-off room of the castle. The paintings and the window and the paraphernalia stored by the guards made me realize that this is what happens with history: someone is always throwing a coat or a bagged lunch over the old stuff, confusing the archaeologists.

I stood by the window and looked out. There was a six-foot-tall gauge in the garden meant for reading the temperature. The King would have stood here where I stand and noted the weather. And so, I thought, I am the King.

The King in question, George V, was born in 1865—a neat hundred years before me. He was the grandson of Queen Victoria and the younger brother of Prince Albert. His brother, who would be king, was engaged to Princess Victoria Mary of Teck. But Prince Albert died of pneumonia during the great influenza pandemic of 1892. He died here at Sandringham. George, the younger brother, and Mary grew close during the mourning and he proposed to her in 1893, a year after his brother’s death. In 1901 Queen Victoria died and George’s father became King Edward VII. That same year George and Mary toured the British empire, including a visit to Newfoundland. This tour was to reward the dominions for their participation in the Boer War. This was the year Thomas Ricketts was born. George’s father died in 1910 and George V reigned until his death in 1936.

When Thomas Ricketts met the King, both men had lost their older brother.

The thermometer, made by Negretti and Zambra, is in Fahrenheit and centigrade. The King stood here and looked at the temperature while Tommy Ricketts ate his breakfast. A cold day in January. It was snowing in parts of England.

It would have been a comfortable breakfast. The study is off the main room, now called the saloon, and the people I had left were just there, behind a wall with a fireplace.

That, said Bob, pointing at the wall I was looking at, was the original ballroom. When more people came to live
here, they built a new ballroom. And this door was camouflaged so you wouldn’t know the King had a study here.

I stood beside the table where Tommy Ricketts had eaten his little breakfast before being invested with the Victoria Cross by King George V.

I thanked Bob for the tour and returned to the saloon to see the hidden door from that side. And there it was: a fine outlined perimeter of a door concealed in the wallpaper and the mouldings.

Outside, vendors were selling postcards and I found one with the hidden door. For my son.
In behind that door,
I wrote,
is where Tommy Ricketts ate his breakfast with the King.
As Tommy Ricketts toured the gardens, Queen Mary picked a white rose and gave it to him.

I walked past kids parked on the grass and people lining the road, all waiting for the Olympic torch. The kids had paper torches with orange paper funnelling out of the top. These had come as free inserts with the
Sun
newspaper. I wondered if any of the children would keep their torches for souvenirs, tuck them in the back slip of a photo album, and their grandchildren a hundred years from now would find them and think, think what? What would they think?

1916 had been an Olympics year. The games were supposed to be held in Berlin. It wasn’t until April that people realized the war was not going to end and the games were called off. In a strange way, you can see the preparations for
the Battle of the Somme as a substitution for those summer games. Near the end of the war Pierre de Courbitin met with his Olympics committee to set up a games for 1920. Antwerp was chosen. Hungary, Bulgaria, Austria, Turkey and Germany were not invited.

I thought of
Eric Robertson, a Blue Puttee, who asked permission to run for Newfoundland in the Olympic marathon. There’s a photo of him at Stob’s Camp, in Scotland, kitted out in athletic gear. Fair hair and blue eyes. It’s as if he spent the war thinking about the 1916 Olympic Games, and when they were cancelled he gunned for 1920. He played the drum in the regimental band. He needed thirty pounds for the Olympic entry fee, he wrote, and had been training for three months. But there were paperwork problems, since Newfoundland was not recognized as an independent country, so in the end Robertson ran for England.

Arthur Wakefield had sporting conquests too. After the war he joined the 1922 Everest expedition as a medical doctor. He was forty-six. He witnessed, through binoculars, the avalanche that killed the seven men with George Mallory.
“The whole wall was white, and there was no string of ascending climbers.” At the 1924 Games the expedition members all received an Olympic medal in alpinism. Wakefield lost his religion after the war, and kept the windows wide open in all weather and “never hugged his children”.

Eric Robertson, in Antwerp, finished the marathon in three hours and fifty-five minutes, or thirty-fifth out of a field of forty-nine—last among those who finished. His war wounds were bothering him but he refused to get into the ambulance. Robertson had been shot in the leg with three exit wounds. After his Olympic run, he was commended “for playing the greatest game of them all”—fighting in the war. War was still being judged as the final, grandest form of sport.

I believe that type of statement should carry with it a jail term. Robertson fought at Gallipoli, where he suffered dysentery and a perforating gunshot wound to his right leg. He fought at Beaumont-Hamel. He was laid up in Wandsworth and was diagnosed with syphilis after a Wassermann reaction turned up positive. He was discharged in August 1917 and returned to St John’s, but remained employed by the regiment as a masseur.

It was a cool wet day in August in Antwerp—a good day for a marathon, much like today at Sandringham. Though there was no torch relay back then. The theft of fire, I thought, for the benefit of civilization. Prometheus means forethought. I waited in a line along the road and then the line wavered and you knew there was a commotion not far off. People were bending their hips and necks into the road. Finally, bobbing over the tops of heads, the torch arrived. The real torch, compared to the paper torches, was
fully alive, and its bearer, wearing a pennant and number, ran past with some urgency, as though the animated quality of the torch might be doused in the light rain. She turned and headed into the estate. It must have been something to have that torch of fire inside.

I walked along and peered into a small outdoor museum—a warehouse full of cars. The beauty of wooden panels on shiny dark green enamel. When cars were still pretending to be horse carriages, the way the Egyptians built furniture ending in an animal’s feet. This was the Daimler belonging to Queen Mary, a car she used for shopping. The museum offered up the history of the royal family through vehicles. Well, I thought, I am walking and I shall search out my own history through nature. I followed my nose into a flower garden and crossed a little stream. It was the same width, I judged, as the Ancre. On the other side was the Glade: a brook in which stood a four-foot stone boy, all green, grey and charcoal. He was carrying over his head a large pail and water poured perpetually from the pail. You are supposed to walk in a flow past this stone boy, but I paused here. There was something about this boy that had echoes of things I’d already witnessed on this trip. A
classroom of kids saw me staring, and stopped to look at the brook as though it must be important.

Kid: What’s in there?

Another kid: Water.

On my way out, I came across a monument to the war dead—a twenty-foot cross surrounded by chain that looked like elegant barbed wire. It appeared to be a First World War memorial, so I had to walk completely around to see. Yes, it was dedicated to the Sandringham Company—a company that was wiped out at Gallipoli. They had entered a woods and not a soul had returned. Not even the company flag was brought back.

Sandringham was part of the Norfolk Regiment. Bernard Ayre was with that regiment and killed on July first.

I asked a gardener to direct me to the church that held Prince John’s grave. It was up a slope through a gap in the wall and into another garden. As I stepped through the gap, I admired the brickwork in the wall: loose, small, brown flat stones in mortar; stones like large Weetabix; and then framed in proper brick, the top, bottom and sides with rounded cement caps. The British exported this type of wall around the world. There are corned-beef facilities in Uruguay surrounded by these walls. Beef that fed the British army—a million tins a day.

Inside the church I spotted a revolving carousel with postcards, indicating that I must be in the right place. I asked
a minister where I might find the gravestone of
Prince John. I was thinking of a song by Al Tuck, the line: “in the days when the people were small and few.” It’s a song that tackles history, but really it’s about the singer’s girlfriend walking amongst the graves, and his perplexity at her interest in the past.

There are two princes buried here, the minister said, both named John and both died very young. This is why no prince in England is given the name John. They are on the east side of the church. And he showed me around the corner. There was little John, who lived for one day in April 1871. He was directly under the stained glass window. His pink granite looked so new I thought it must be refurbished. The minister understood my suspicion. That stone wears well, he said. It could be original.

Like he was buried yesterday, I said. One day old, that’s what keeps your headstone new.

I thought of the little teddy bears many of the soldiers carried in a tunic breast pocket, the head of the little bear staring up. I had visited a museum in Toronto that was full of these bears. They were given by loved ones and when the soldier peered down, he had a loving, loyal face staring right up at him. In an adjoining gallery, after the bears, was the shock of
a colourful, praying Hitler. He is kneeling and gazing up at Christ.

That is what happens in a graveyard, too. We look to heaven, waiting for a visitor to peer down on us. It is a
terrible punishment to be buried staring at the earth, not facing the sky.

Against the church wall there grew tall purple-and-white foxglove. And next to the one-day-old John was the John I was looking for:

The gravestone had a Celtic design.
And in thy kingdom he shall have rest.

This Prince John, this boy of fourteen, had died the night before the investiture of Tommy Ricketts. Prince John took things literally. He was told, after the death of his grandfather Edward VII, that dead people “went on the wind.” Days later little John was seen collecting leaves.

What are you doing? someone asked.

Collecting grandpa’s pieces.

He had a fit early in the morning and died late that night. The family mourned and then the next day the King bestowed upon Tommy Ricketts the Victoria Cross. It must have been awkward for the King, to see this young man who had signed up at fifteen. To see this beautiful
young soldier awarded the highest honour of valour, while in a room not far off his own son lay dead.