College Record 2013

substituting ‘Queen’ for ‘King’, and in the second verse beseeching the Lord of
Heaven and Earth to sow confusion on the enemies of Queen Elizabeth II. The
mood amongst my friends, however, very rapidly changed to one of relief and, I
regret to say, joy, because rumour again intervened to tell us we would have a day
off school to assuage our ‘grief ’. I imagined that I would have time to spend with my
pet snakes and lizards, newts and fish, or perhaps wander down to the woods with
my best friend Roger in order to observe birds or woodlice, or get up to no good
with Peter and George, two tearaways who led me into very bad ways, stealing
goldfish from a neighbouring estate, an activity perhaps less dangerous than some
of the other activities of my feral childhood such as throwing stones at passers-by
over the hedge or, in the guise of a medieval knight (history was always a passion),
firing a flight of arrows over the house which came down to form a corona around
the pram of a sleeping baby three houses away. Who said the 1950s weren’t fun!
Alas, we were soon told that the day off would have be postponed until the
Coronation the following year, which felt like an age away. When that came round,
however, it turned out to be quite fun, though in retrospect just a little confused
in my mind with the Festival of Britain which took place a year or so before the
death of King George. That Festival, with all its quirkiness, made an impression on
my imagination, from the Skylon ( nicknamed ‘Churchill’s Cigar’) to the Dome of
Discovery with its models of life in Ancient Britain designed by Jacquetta Hawkes.
These ended up in Leicester Museum where I got to know them well in later years,
and they made me determined to become an archaeologist. There was also the
funfair in Battersea Park, and especially the grotto, with this over its entrance:
Please remember the grotto
Father’s gone to sea
Mother’s gone to fetch him back
So will you remember me.
Things always seemed to be going on in London, and the Coronation when it came
– on 2 June 1953; we have just been celebrating its sixtieth anniversary – was a
wonderful pageant for the young mind: all those stands along the Mall, bunting
everywhere, an air of anticipation, excited children eating ‘knickabocker glories’ in
Selfridges. And always those images of the pretty young Queen on every hoarding.
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