Sunday 19 March 2006

Once Upon a Time

The celebration of a milestone birthday gives us all pause.  I had one this last week.  The Queen has one next month.  In thinking about turning fifty, and writing this column, I realized something about the mystique that originally drew me toward an interest in monarchy in general, and the current Queen in particular. 

Queen Elizabeth II has been on the throne for my whole life, plus four years.  She�s just about the only internationally prominent figure that has been around for as long as I can remember.  Churchill, Eisenhower and Kennedy, Pope John XXIII, Nikita Khrushchev, Chairman Mao, and almost all of their era have long since gone the way of all flesh.  Fidel Castro is still hanging in there, but he wasn�t really quite on the scene when I was first born.  Liz Taylor and one or two other increasingly ancient movie stars still show up occasionally.  Despite various reports, God is not known to be dead.  I am pretty certain that Bishop Robinson, who wrote one of those reports, is. 

I remember watching Winston Churchill�s funeral in 1965.  The solemnity of the day impressed itself on a nine-year-old, probably reinforced by the black and white austerity of the television pictures.  Having been to a few family funerals by then, I remember being impressed that there was special etiquette about how who came and went first, the Queen or the Churchill family.   It was not as sad as President Kennedy�s funeral.  Just very grandly somber. 

Churchill, of course, was almost synonymous with World War II.  And that lay only twenty years in the past when he died.  To a child it all seemed like ancient history, but it was history with living witnesses who could and would tell epic tales like General Eisenhower�s Crusade in Europe. 

I am not sure how long it was after that when I ran across some slightly tattered books in our local library.  They were the books Marion Crawford had written about her work as governess with Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret, beginning with The Little Princesses.  Innocuous as they are, they were the first of the �royal servant memoir� genre that has since plagued the Windsors.  And they got poor Crawfie spurned by her former employers.  What I recall, though, is learning about how the two princesses ended up holed up at Windsor Castle for the war years, living a pretty lonely life in the great pile, chilly and rationed like everyone else, using a dungeon for an air raid shelter, and making cheerful pantomime posters to fill in the frames of the old masters that had been stored safely away.  The impression conveyed was of a rather wistful solitude rather like the mood at the beginning of the recent Narnia movie. 

U.S. Newsman Tom Brokaw wrote a book several years ago now called The Greatest Generation.  It deals with the heroic generation that faced World War II squarely in the eye.  The Queen doesn�t quite make the age cut, but she may be the only one still around who was featured in the newsreels and gave radio broadcasts to the people of Britain at the time � �Come say goodnight to the children, Margaret.� 

My point in all this is to say that my early sense of Queens and Kings was of people who were caught up as leading participants in the great events of their time.  They were part of the epic events.  And some, like the Duke of Kent, even died.  But what I also realize is that thus far in this Queen�s reign, and my lifetime, there have been no comparable worldwide epics.  There have been many dramas, and much change and progress, but no real epics.  The Iron Curtain became a stalemate, and ultimately crumbled through banality.  Nuclear Holocaust has been averted, thus far.  The world has passed from empires, not to a workers� paradise but to the multinational merchant guilds instead.  Only the recent threatening stormclouds of Radical Islamic Fundamentalism, and the fears of the increasingly evident impact of global warming give real pause� perhaps along with the simmering prospect of an avian flu pandemic.  The world has changed, and I admit to still feeling a bit disoriented in this new one. 

It is not as though the various royals are actually disengaged from any of the current real world threats.  The Queen was notably out front, and outspoken, after the London bombings last summer.  And � notwithstanding what we may each think about the current war � within a few months Prince Harry could be serving in Iraq.  No.  In my mind it is just that in many respects the world is less clearly defined than it was fifty years ago.  It is far more fragmented, and all of us are rather more self-interested.  There is not a lot that the royals can do, except to speak up as they are able for the right things like social tolerance, human rights, care for the earth, and such.  And I wonder if it seems to them, as it seems to me, that fewer and fewer in the world are listening. 

When Elizabeth II came to the throne the PR spinners of the day dubbed it the dawn of �the new Elizabethan Age.�  Fortunately or not, space flight didn�t bring forth the new Raleighs and Drakes; the Politburos crumbled more quietly and ignominiously  than the Inquisition; and the new Armada never quite made it beyond the fantasies of Star Trek.  The British Empire morphed rather than falling, but the Commonwealth has proved rather too mundane.  The Royal Yacht Britannia has become a tourist trap in Edinburgh.  And, for many, the memory of the phrase �Cool Britannia� is just plain embarrassing these days.  But the chatelaine of Windsor abides. 

One of my favorite birthday greetings this week said, �Life may not be the party we hoped for� but while we�re here, we might as well dance.�  I liked that.  It is not the world I hoped for at age twenty, or thirty, or even at forty.  But I�ll keep on trying.  Meanwhile, this week �her Maj� has danced carefully on, Down Under, and the world dances on as well.  Who knows what the next decade holds.  After all, in some ways Victoria didn�t really hit her stride until the Diamond Jubilee.

Yours Aye,

- Ken Cuthbertson