“Throughout the country,” the faintly contemptuous, ascetic voice of the B.B.C. news reader has told us to often in the last week, people have been doing this or that— “hoping against hope that the weather,” “accompanying the Queen in their thoughts,” rejoicing, and then, somewhat solemnly “taking their well-earned rest,” or “going once more about their daily business,” or, somewhat facetiously, “nursing the inevitable headache.” The phrases are so stale that they probably evoke no image. Or, if they do, it is at the most a fleeting, slightly uncomfortable remembrance of that vast, disquieting body of people who do not live in London and whose actions, therefore, are at once “so important a social factor” and so improbable. A quick succession of visual images — provincial town balls, streets with trams, market crosses, slag heaps and seaside piers — may pass across one’s mind like the horrible intimations of a thousand private lives outside our own that make an express train’s progress through the London suburbs so disquieting an experience.
The whole thing is not a private London dream, sweet or nightmarish according to taste, not just yours and mine, but of all those familiar figures of “Housewives’ Choice” and “Family Favourites.” This time, indeed, I did not try to preserve the comfortable, little Londoner’s view of England’s rejoicings. Urged perhaps by some innate Republicanism, but far more probably by my foolish failure to secure a seat on the Procession route, I spent Coronation day in the most beautiful of Essex towns, and, undeterred by the rain that had swept the market square so carefully prepared for Olde Tyme Dancing and had dripped from the thatched roofs of a hundred stockbrokers’, journalists’ and publishers’ country cottages, I returned there again last weekend to see the celebrations that closed this week of festivity.
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