A rainy teatime in the city and everyone is trying to get home including, for the final time, the late Queen Elizabeth II. The crowds gather. The narrow road crossings where Hyde Park Corner meets Constitution Hill is busy with mourners, with commuters, with television people, with joggers and with others who simply who have somewhere to be.
“I’m just trying to get to the theatre,” laughs one woman as the lights turn red and green again.
“I am late for choir. What are you going to see?”
“Hamilton.”
When the queen’s casket left Edinburgh in the C-7 Globemaster, a beast of a machine, the skies were sparkling blue and the countryside she adored put on a show. But down in London, the rain had been falling all afternoon, turning the vast blanket of floral tributes and handwritten notes circling the trees in Green Park sodden. She was coming home to a familiar London, the rain, the black umbrellas, the squelching tyres of buses. She was coming home to Bette Midler’s observation that when it is 3 o’clock in New York, it’s still 1938 in London. But given the generations she spanned, perhaps that was appropriate. What better night for the wartime ghosts to gather?
When she took her first flight as queen, it was home from Kenya to mourn her father: King George VI had succumbed. It was February 1952. She was the new monarch. The black and white photographs show a pale, slender young woman and the unmistakable bulk of Churchill waiting for her at the foot of the aircraft stairs. Now, on a rainy September in 2022, the crowds gathered along the route for her last trip to the Palace. They had the fire bowls lit at the pillars marking the start of Constitution Hill, the direct route to the palace where the family waited in what may be their only moment of not privacy, of not being on show, of the entire week.
Only Tuesday night and already the United Kingdom’s period of mourning seems to have been going on for a long time. People are tired. You can see it in their faces as the rush hour traffic hurtles past. There is no real viewing space. The hedges are too high. People stand on monument ledges, on the narrow bike stands.
Waiting at Hyde Park is Tonia Mayo and her cousin Nicola. They have brought Nicola’s baby girl Ellie Rose, snug in a pram decorated in the Union Jack, so she can one day know she was part of this. Tonia and her sisters and daughters travelled up to London yesterday.
“Because my Nan, Joyce, would have been 100 years old. She passed away on April 4th this year. So, we came as a tribute to my nan really. We put flowers at the palace gates and went for afternoon tea. Because she absolutely adored the queen. She was a big royalist. And it meant a lot to us.
“I feel very emotional,” Tonia said, welling up suddenly.
“Because my Nan was well and truly and Londoner. She loved everything about it. She had seen the queen in wartime and that is why she had great respect for her.
They are east enders — Dalston, originally. They proudly claim Irish ancestry — Mayo and Manning. And the queen matters greatly to them. Their nan, Joyce Hickey, met William and Kate at a garden party at which the queen attended. The Royal family was a constant reference point in the house. When Princess Diana died in 1997, Tonia’s mother, a florist, issued free bouquets from the shop so those who could not afford flowers could bring them anyway during that strained late summer week,
“It is different because Diana was a young woman,” says Tonia of the mood this week.
“The queen was an older lady. Don’t get me wrong, it was a big shock. But it is easier to accept with the queen. But she was one of those people you feel would be here forever.”
It did seem like that. For 45 minutes, the crowd grows thicker and waits for the procession to sweep around past Wellington Arch. On mobile televisions, people watch its progress along the bereft motorways of outer London until eventually, there is a hush. The queen’s casket sweeps past in a blaze of cars of blue lights that make the puddles shine. There’s a pause as the gathering tries to inhale the moment. A warm, muted applause breaks out and afterwards a polite three cheers. Witnessing live history is a fleeting business, just like that, the crowd melts into the dusk. Home awaits. The drear Tube; a cup of tea; the 10 o’clock news. The sweep of history.
