End of an Era Part V
Back on the Piccadilly Line, Jeff and Drew had also sat in silence as the train sped through the outer London suburbs and into the inner city. For Drew, it seemed a long time since he had last made this journey, and then in the opposite direction as he had run for home and away from his abusive wife. As the automated announcer named each station, and they became more familiar as they hurtled towards Kensington, he felt his heart start to beat a little faster. He knew full well that his ex-wife no longer lived in the city, and was thousands of miles away in the Middle East, but there was always the risk that she could be back in the country for a visit from the gulf state she now worked in…
For Jeff, those same names reminded him that he was coming ever closer to places where he had met the Duchess for the first time. She was now the Princess of Wales, of course. That changed a lot, and that fact made him a little bit sad if he was being honest, on his own behalf. He had to focus though, and recall that they were not alighting at South Kensington, as he had always done when he lived in London, but at the station before, Gloucester Road. That was an issue in itself; it was the stop at which Drew had boarded the tube when he had escaped, and so the whole place could potentially generate bad memories…
However, as it turned out, seeing the place again had exactly the opposite effect on his friend, much to the surprise of both of them. He walked out of the station a much happier man than he had been on the day he had last entered it. He had a career that was booming, and domestically he had never been so happy as he was sharing a home with his daughter and his best friend. He felt a warm glow at the sight of the familiar buildings in a neighbourhood that had once held his residence – it was never truly a home – and then there were the splashes of red, from pillar boxes to the double decker buses trundling along…
Of course, there was also a lot of black, draped over the displays in the shop windows, many of which also contained a picture of the late monarch. He stared at that for a moment, then said to Jeff, "Was it like this before, when the Duke of Edinburgh died?"
Jeff smiled sadly and nodded. "I actually think that it might be even more pronounced this time. This has come as a much more devastating blow, as she was the face of an era, and now the whole world is changing, the old stability gone…"
Not wishing to linger too long, Jeff moved on in the direction of Miss Frobisher's kindergarten, a familiar destination for both men. The lady herself must have been watching for them, as she came to the door before they had a chance to ring the bell. She looked older to them both as soon as they saw her, and was dressed from head to toe in black. Drew immediately dropped his holdall to the ground and stepped forward to pull her into a hug, which made her cry almost instantly. He held her in an embrace for a little while, and then let her go. She pulled out her handkerchief and dried her eyes, and then spoke.
"It is so good of both of you to come here at what is the saddest of times for this country. It honestly feels as if a light that has shone upon us all for so many years has now been extinguished. We will never see her like again, and that fills an older woman like me with such sadness; she is the only monarch that I have ever known, and to say God Save the King seems so wrong… Now, I have taken the afternoon off; I have not done so especially before you worry; it is something that I have started to do from the beginning of this school year. Therefore, as it is nearly lunchtime, I suggest that you both wait in my office and then we can head to my home together. I have just made a fresh pot of tea, and there are cakes too…"
The two visitors agreed, and having settled them in, she went back to her charges. "She seems to have aged ten years almost overnight," said Drew quietly once she was out of earshot.
Jeff poured out the tea, and replied, "Black can make people look older, or so Kurt once told me. Add in all that has happened and it is no wonder that she looks that way; her emotions have been drained completely. It seems like only yesterday that Nick and I were here for the celebrations for her centenary, and the whole country was full of colour, bedecked in bunting to commemorate that milestone… Now it is all shrouded in grief and sadness."
"I did notice the complete absence of colour in what people were wearing; even the kids are not wearing the bright colours that I would expect. It is a sea of black and dull shades… There is also a distinct lack of noise in here too, compared to how it was when Evie came here."
"It was much the same when the Duke passed away; all fun was suspended it seemed until after the funeral. It is hard for me to imagine what it is going to be like when we are attending the Lying in State. I have a horrible feeling that it will be a maelstrom of sadness…"
Promptly at noon, Miss Frobisher returned to her office, and collected her coat and hat. After a quick word to her deputy, she escorted her two visitors out of the school and walked them the short distance to her home. It had once been the gate lodge for one of the grand mansion houses that had graced the area. That house had long since been demolished, and had been replaced by non-descript, almost utilitarian blocks of flats in the 1950s. Prior to that, it had spent the last years of its life as the temporary offices of a publishing firm, an emergency relocation after the destruction that had been wrought on one night in December 1940…
All of this she explained to them once she had them inside, their bags in the spare bedroom. They sat down for a light lunch and she told them the full tale. "My grandfather was a senior partner in the publishing firm in question, and he used his own money to purchase what was then a pretty run down and deserted house, in an area that seemed almost immune to air raid damage. It was ideal for a temporary office, but not really suitable for modern living, so as soon as the company had a new office to go to, he sold the site for development, except for the gate lodge, which he saw as an ideal starter home for my father, then a newlywed." Jeff nodded, already knowing some of the story, but it was all new to Drew. She carried on with a small smile as she recalled her parents and what they used to say about her home…
"Dad always used to joke to friends that we only had this lovely property with a desirable postcode because of Hitler, and in a way, it is true; had the Luftwaffe not bombed Paternoster Row out of existence on that dark night, my grandfather would never have acquired the old house… They call the events of the night of Sunday 29th December 1940 The Second Great Fire of London; to those in the publishing trade, it is known as The Night The Books Burned. No-one could have known when the sirens sounded at about 6.15pm that night what was going to happen. The City of London was deserted, offices closed and locked up for the weekend. In Paternoster Row, just behind St Paul's Cathedral, most of the offices and warehouses of the city's publishers were deserted; no firewatchers were present, as it wasn't then the law for them to be…."
She paused, shaking her head at that, then went on, "When the incendiary bombs began to fall, there was nobody around to quickly extinguish them, and they quickly set light to all those old buildings, tightly packed together and full of paper. In those days, the publishers still had their warehouses there, and they estimate that around 5,000,000 books were destroyed that night. My grandfather's firm had a secondary warehouse near Richmond, and so they were less harmed than others. One unlucky firm had a second warehouse in Bermondsey, and it was struck the same night! On the Friday at 4pm, they could offer for immediate collection a selection of 5000 titles; on the Monday morning at 10am, their entire catalogue stood at the grand figure of 12 titles, and they only had those as they were at the bookbinders in the west of London at the time…"
"It sounds like the sort of Nazi atrocity that they would have been proud to carry out in person; they just did it unintentionally," remarked Drew.
"With the shortage of paper at the time, that was exactly what it was; an atrocity. Several firms ceased to exist that night, unable to recover from the loss. You might never have heard of it, but what most people don't realise is that they will have seen an image of the street as it blazed. That famous photograph of St Paul's Cathedral, only saved by the valiant works of its own volunteer firewatchers, surrounded by flames – the buildings burning in the foreground of that were those of Paternoster Row."
As Jeff and Drew ate and listened to their history lesson, lunch was also being taken in Surrey at the Crawford house. Sebastian had barely been in the door when there had been a knock, and Adam's grandmother had joined them. The death of the monarch had affected her quite keenly, and her questioning of the Broadway actor at the lunch table was nowhere near as sharp and probing as Adam had expected it to be. With the meal over, however, she was the one that raised the next big question. "You have come back to attend the Lying in State I hear. I would also like to attend, and so I assume that you will have no objection if I join you…"
"None whatsoever granny, but the wait time is quite prohibitive for a…" Adam began, and then stopped abruptly as he saw his father shaking his head.
"Your father has already used the words 'lady of your age', my boy, so please do not put a black mark in your copybook by repeating them. When I was 5 years old, my mother and grandmother stood with me all night in a queue so that we could solemnly file past her father's coffin. Now, some 75 years later, it is the least that I can do for her to do exactly the same. We can take a folding chair or two with us; I have a couple that are still sturdy enough, but have been replaced by newer ones at the end of last summer. They were going to the jumble sale this summer in any case; we can take them with us and then leave them with one of the stewards when we are nearly at Westminster Hall, and they can donate them to a charity for us…"
Adam looked at his parents then, and saw that they too doubted how happy the stewards would be with that notion, but he said nothing as his grandmother carried on. "We can take flasks of tea and soup with us to sustain us in small backpacks or a carrier bag, which are allowed to be taken into the Hall. I hear that there are also coffee stalls set up along the route, and I suspect that there will be food stalls too, even just a disreputable burger van or two. I have a good winter coat similar to the ones I see you both brought, and we can keep moving to increase our circulation. It shouldn't be an issue for any of us…"
"I quite agree with you, Mrs Crawford," said Sebastian. "On a personal level, I have experience of the harshness of winters in Ohio, where in the dead of winter we can have weeks when the mercury is below 32° Fahrenheit, and below 0° Fahrenheit is not an uncommon temperature on the coldest nights. Sensible clothing and layering is a must at all times, and woe betide anyone that thinks otherwise…"
Mrs Crawford nodded, and then started on a diatribe about the cavalier attitude of the younger generation these days to the extremes of the weather…
Later on, Adam took Sebastian for a stroll through the village, and as soon as they had left the house, he had smiled at him. "Well, you have certainly charmed my grandmother with all of your talk about not being able to understand the younger generation! She and my sister have regular spats over the fact that the latter refuses point blank to layer up and wear what my granny calls 'proper coats' in the winter months, and even more regular debates about the fact that she doesn't make her children wrap up in the thick woolly jumpers she sends them for Christmas every year either. I must admit that on my first ever trip to New York, the year before I started my time at NYADA, I froze almost at once in my thin coat, and had to get mum to wire me money to buy a thick wool coat to wrap up in and escape the cold…"
"Now you know better, and your grandmother, if she knows about it, probably feels entirely vindicated! Will your sister be coming to London to join us, just so I know if I will have to witness the squabbles first hand…"
"No, she won't be; she actually went to see the coffin with her husband and children when it was in Edinburgh, and paid her respects there," Adam replied, secretly glad that he would not have to listen to the arguments again… As they had been talking, they had been walking, and now found themselves at the lychgate of the parish church. He looked across at the building, an urge filling him all of a sudden…
"If you want to go in and pray, then I will join you. I am a very lapsed Roman Catholic myself, but at a time like this…" Sebastian said quietly, seeing where the other man was looking. That was how they ended up kneeling and praying quietly side by side in the church, before they lit a candle each and wrote their names in the book of condolence that was being supervised by the wife of the vicar, who was delighted to have the names of a locally born celebrity and his equally well-known friend written in there…
Sebastian called Jeff later that evening to update him on the plan for attending the Lying in State. That the Crawford family would be joining them was not a shock, and having chatted to Miss Frobisher about the idea, they were agreed that they would aim to join the queue at around 4am on the Saturday morning, hoping that many other people would still be in bed and not hastening to do the same. Jeff agreed that arranging to meet at the end point of the queue route was the best plan, although they would check the government webpage around half an hour beforehand, and if the end of the line was far from that point, move their rendezvous to a more appropriate place…
How they would get there had also been decided. Given the likelihood of parking issues near the queue, Mr Crawford intended to drive them all down to the station at East Croydon, where all day parking was easily available, and there they would board one of the all night trains that headed into the city. At what station they would alight would be dictated by where the end of the queue was at that point in time; the benefit of the Oyster card system was not having to state a destination in advance, and there was a comprehensive network of all night buses to get them even closer thereafter…
As for the group in Kensington, Miss Frobisher had a solution. She had a friend that was a black cab driver, and when she had mentioned her intention to attend the Lying in State, he had offered to chauffeur her and any guests she had to the end of the queue without any charge. That shocked Jeff and Drew a little, until she explained. "His son was a student of mine almost thirty years ago now, and I knew the family's financial circumstances, and so I refused to take payment from them, saying he had a scholarship. That little boy has gone on to be a senior director in one of the country's biggest companies, and well, his father believes that he only got there because of the excellent start I gave him in life. I personally think that the debt is long repaid, but he refuses to accept that. It's almost like having a personal driver at my beck and call…"
Jeff and Drew were both grateful to the man in question though, as getting across the city in the small hours of the morning would have been complicated to say the least, even with the good bus network; it wasn't set up to connect very well. With the decision made, they all headed for bed, their alarms set for early the next day; a good preparation for the even earlier start on Saturday…
Sebastian would crawl out of his bed at the Crawford's home the next morning at 3am with a groan, but he could smell the delicious aroma of freshly made real coffee in the air. He slipped on the robe that had been provided, and then headed down to the kitchen, to find his hostess sitting there, drinking a cup of tea, the television tuned into a livestream of the current situation in Westminster Hall. The people that were now filing slowly past the coffin where those that had begun to queue up to a day ago, the announcer was whispering. What did not surprise him as he observed the footage was the fact that every single person there was in sober attire, or a military uniform, and all were silent. Some people paused for a moment, and bowed at the coffin; the old soldiers saluted; others just walked past slowly with their heads down in respect…
"It does make me proud of my country when you see things like this," said Annie Crawford, who had moved whilst Sebastian had been watching entranced, and was now pouring him a cup of coffee. "You can tell the ex-military by either their uniform, or just in the way they stand, their whole demeanour one of respect. They stand to attention and then salute her, as she was their Commander in Chief. The fact that it is people from all walks of life that are gathered there too, of all ages, creeds and colours gives me such hope too. The truth is that Her Majesty was loved and respected almost universally, in a way that nobody ever will be again, in my opinion…"
Sebastian nodded, then almost jumped out of his skin when two loud bangs rang out through the medieval room he was observing. "Don't worry, that is only the signal to indicate the changing of the guard," said Annie, and sure enough, as he watched, the queue paused moving as the uniformed guardsmen raised their swords in salute, and then marched away with ceremony and precision to be replaced by fresh comrades. Had such a scene taken place on any other day, and in a less sombre surrounding, then the whole thing would have been captured by tourists' cameras. He watched impressed and then, with two more loud bangs on the stone floor, the queue began to move once more. It was fascinating to observe, and Sebastian remained glued to the screen as he consumed his breakfast…
A similar scene was taking place in Kensington, Jeff wishing that he could take his drawing pad into the Hall and be allowed to sketch all that he could see there, ideally from the raised gallery he observed to one side. He said as much, and blanched as Miss Frobisher explained that the area he saw was in actual fact the VIP Gallery, and those world leaders and royalty that wished to see the coffin before the funeral would be gathered there to pay their respects…
Nonetheless, he did have in his bag a small, notepad sized sketchbook, which he had purchased on the last full day in Manhattan, and his trusty tin of pencils, and his intention was to sketch their time in the queue and those that were waiting with them, if they permitted it…
He had decided that he would head into the city that day once Miss Frobisher was at work, and visit the royal parks to see the gathered floral tributes, and possibly sketch them as well. He had not imagined for one moment that Drew would wish to come with him on such a mission, but when Jeff stated his plans, he immediately asked to accompany him. That was how they had ended up on the Piccadilly Line train again, heading to Green Park station, standing in the busy carriage, both clutching a bunch of flowers that they had selected from a florist shop that they passed on the way to the tube; Miss Frobisher had already left a tribute of her own at the gates of Kensington Palace. As they looked around them in the carriage, they realised that in carrying flowers, they were part of the majority, as so many other people were headed to the parks for the same reason. They also saw a large number of a certain toy bear being carried, the one that had joined the Queen so memorably for tea back in 2022, and had become somehow interlinked with her ever since…
As they left the station, Drew whispered to Jeff, "There are hundreds of those bears in the parks already. I know that it is a touching tribute, but I do hope that they are all found a good home afterwards…" Jeff nodded in agreement, looking around him at the scene, and observing at once that the flags flying on the Ritz Hotel were at half-mast. Then they stepped into the expanse of Green Park itself, passing flower stalls at the entrance. A few steps later and they both halted, Jeff letting out a gasp at what he saw. They were now at the start of what appeared to be not a sea but an ocean of flowers; bunch after bunch, each with a small card attached, a heartfelt message written thereon. They walked on slowly, pausing to read some of the words. Eventually they found an empty spot in which they could lay down their own offering, and bowed their heads for a moment. There was a bench nearby, and Drew sat down on it and waited patiently, just as Nick had done for years, as Jeff pulled out his sketchbook to try and capture the scene…
As Jeff was drawing in the park, his husband was serving up breakfast to their son, one eye on the clock as usual. He had found it strange to come home the previous night and walk straight past his own front door, his feet taking him to Ethan and Drew's place instead to collect Wes. He was greeted at the front door by Evie, who escorted him into the kitchen. A couple of minutes later and he was seated at the table as Ethan served him dinner, as a return for the fact that Nick had fed him the night before. Ethan was the first to admit that he was no master chef, but he had learned during his time at Cambridge how to cook that most English of staples, Cottage Pie. He had placed a generous portion in front of his friend, and after a few mouthfuls, Nick had to admit that the dish was flavoursome and all the more satisfying for the fact that someone else had prepared it for him…
The conversation between the two former Warblers quickly came round to events in Britain, and Ethan switched on the television. They sat in silence as they watched the live feed that was coming through from Westminster Hall, knowing that at some point in the next few days they would see some familiar faces there, albeit briefly, as they walked slowly past the high catafalque… "It still feels kind of unreal to me, that all of this is happening across the Atlantic," remarked Ethan. "I never met her, unlike you, but she looked immortal. I was browsing the internet the other night, and I came across footage of her father's Lying in State. To see it being repeated like this now, albeit with the people in more modern garb, is kind of spooky…"
"It is like that at work as well, if I am being honest," replied Nick. "Normally when a Head of State dies, the Secretary General offers his condolences, and then business goes on as normal. The death of Her Majesty, however, has triggered such an outpouring of grief from every member state that the feeling was that more needed to be done. To that end, the assembly is to be convened for a special meeting on Monday so that everyone has a public forum to express their feelings. The passing of the Queen is really an event that has shaken the entire global community to the core…"
Later that night, with Wes safely snuggled up in bed, Nick decided on a whim to call Trent, hoping that the other member of the four musketeers that was in the country had a free moment. He did, but after a few minutes of conversation, he had news for Nick… "The President, the First Lady and the Obamas will all be in attendance at the funeral on Wednesday, which means that if something serious happens, Burt Hummel will be in de facto charge of the United States in their absence. If some terrible accident were to happen whilst we are all in London, then he technically becomes the President," Trent said, knowing that he did not need to tell Nick that what he had just said could not be repeated.
Nick chuckled, and replied in a sarcastic tone, "Wow, I bet that Burt loves…" Then he stopped and realised what his friend had just said. "Wait, did you just say whilst we are in London? Are you going to be going with them?"
"Guilty as charged, which does mean that you will be the sole member of our little gang of musketeers that will not be in London for the event. If I am being honest though, I would much rather not be going, and I even volunteered to be on Zoom for them 24/7 rather than crossing the pond, but it cut no ice. Rory is not pleased about my being away either."
"I guess the one thing it does show is just how much the President depends on you and your speech writing abilities. As for me, frankly and between us, I am glad that I can't be there. When the city of London goes into a state of deep mourning for royalty, the entire character of the city changes, and not for the better, trust me."
"I very much doubt that I will see much of what is going on in the city, except on television. I will be based at Winfield House for pretty much the entire trip. There is to be a reception at the Palace for all of the invited dignitaries and Heads of State, but no advisors are permitted there due to a lack of space. It is hard to imagine that somewhere the size of Buckingham Palace could lack space, but then there are so many nations sending someone to the event. On another note, have you heard from Jeff?"
Nick laughed, and said, "I know that he is there, and that he and Drew are at Miss Frobisher's, but since that first message, there has been complete radio silence. I expect that he will call me at some point tomorrow; he kind of said as much, but then again, once he is deeply into something…"
"Well, when he does call, don't tell him that I am going to be in London as well. He would only want to either come and see me, or ask me to join them, and I will be much too busy for anything like that; on top of my usual workload, there will be a plethora of transatlantic phone calls to organise and take…"