A Right Royal Reception
The funny thing is that I am a socialist, but I get excited by royalty. I know it’s inconsistent, but it’s always been about people for me. I don’t believe it when people say they don’t care about the royals.
The Queen is almost exactly fifteen years older than me and I clearly remember her Coronation. At the time I told myself I’d never forget it and I never have. Over the years I’ve played various queens, including her great-great-grandmother, Victoria — more than once. But that was the nearest I had got.
So when the invitation arrived to attend the reception for British Book Week at Buckingham Palace, I was thrilled. Everyone connected with the world of books was invited; I was there in my capacity as a reader of audio books. As always, when lovely things happen, I wished my parents had been alive to kvell. Everything they had worked for, every sacrifice they had made, was to make my life better. At last, despite my rackety choice of profession (Daddy never did quite come to terms with acting), despite my lack of Jewish doctor husband and children, despite my odd friends and unusual lifestyle, I was finally fulfilling Mummy’s dream of ‘meeting the best people’.
My old schoolfriend Brigid Davin had been invited too and we went by taxi to the palace. One of her colleagues, a Scottish representative of the Booksellers Association, came also. I had dressed more thoughtfully for once; it was an indoor party so I felt it would not be impolite to forgo wearing a hat (I look like a mushroom in a hat).
We had a sticker for the taxi windscreen, so we were waved in by the policeman on duty and sailed through the famous gates and rolled up to the entrance in the courtyard behind. Smiling equerries opened the taxi door and we stepped out, to be guided to the very large reception hall where hundreds of people thronged and buzzed. I felt this might be my opportunity to fulfil a dream: I approached one of the equerries lining the red and gold walls and said, ‘Excuse me, do you think it would be possible for me to meet the Queen? I would so love to.’ He looked down at me (they are all tall) and said, ‘Oh, yes, it’s perfectly possible. You simply locate Her Majesty in this melee, form a semicircle, smile, and if Her Majesty sees you smiling in her direction, she will approach and talk to you.’
You can understand that however portly one is, forming a semi-circle on one’s own is challenging. Brigid wasn’t interested in meeting Her Majesty, and she went off to find an ashtray and a seat, so I went with her Scottish friend to hunt down the Queen.
The crowd was huge and noisy but, despite her being tiny, about my height, we immediately spotted the Queen, looking exactly as she should, with a helmet of iron-grey hair and her handbag clamped like a grenade to her elbow. We quickly shuffled into a semicircle, using a Trooping the Colour technique, and pasted rictus smiles on our faces. In a few moments, Her Majesty turned in our direction, saw that we were smiling and came towards us; others soon followed to join our semicircle.
Unbelievably, Her Majesty the Queen was standing in front of me. ‘And what do you do?’ she asked.
That was where I made my first mistake: meeting the royals does tend to make people daft. Instead of saying like any normal person, ‘Your Majesty, I am an actress who records audio books,’ I took a deep breath, and declared, ‘Your Majesty, I am the best reader of stories in the whole world!’ Her Majesty looked at me wearily, rolled her eyes heavenwards, sighed and turned away to my Scottish friend, who was standing next to me. She said to him, ‘And what do you do?’ He replied, ‘Your Majesty, I’m an academic trying to help dyslexic children to read. We’ve discovered that if the letters on the page are printed in different colours and if the pages themselves, the paper, is of different colours, it helps the children to absorb the information more quickly and easily.’ Listening beside him, I couldn’t help joining in: ‘How fascinating!’ I said. ‘My goodness, I didn’t know that.’ At which, Her Majesty turned back to me and said sharply, ‘Be quiet!’ The ‘t’ of ‘quiet’ was especially crisp.
Everyone looked down, trying to contain their embarrassment at my gaffe. Undeterred, I spoke again: ‘I’m so sorry, Your Majesty, I got carried away with excitement.’ The Queen rolled her eyes — again — sighed and, deciding to ignore my remark, started to talk to our semi-circle: ‘This morning I went to a girls’ school in North London, and I was most fascinated to attend the literature class there, and watch the girls being taught by a most expert teacher. And clearly her passion for the subject was what illuminated it for them. They were not particularly interested in literature. Indeed, sadly, very few people are these days. But I could tell that it was what she was communicating to the class that was holding their attention…’
I was keen to respond so, once more ignoring her request for my silence, I blurted: ‘But, you see, Your Majesty, we are so lucky to be born English and to have English as our first language, because we have the finest literature in the world. And we can read it in the original. We don’t need translations to read Shakespeare and Dickens and Keats and Wordsworth and Shelley and Browning and Mrs Gaskell and the Brontës and Jane Austen…’ I was going right through the syllabus. I could sense the Queen was getting a bit restless. I stepped closer to Her Majesty, recklessly warming to my theme: ‘You see, Your Majesty, we are so lucky that we’re born English, that English is our language. Imagine, for example, Your Majesty, if we had been born’ — I paused, searching for a country that I assumed didn’t boast much of a literature and I came up with — ‘Albanian!’
Well, that was altogether too much for the Queen. I supposed it smacked of the political. Alarm crossed her face and she moved away, anxious to put some distance between herself and this clearly crazed woman. Clutching the handbag even more closely and murmuring ‘Yes, yes’ vaguely to herself, she disappeared into the throng.
In 2002, another thick, creamy-white envelope, embossed with the royal insignia, was delivered, announcing that I had been awarded an OBE for Services to Drama.
A lot of people were quite surprised, none so more so than me. Some people think that because of my political views, I shouldn’t have accepted my OBE. Of course, I shouldn’t have; I know that. It goes against everything I believe in, but I most certainly wasn’t going to turn it down.
When you get ‘the nod’, you’re not supposed to tell anybody, and I didn’t. But the only way I could keep it to myself was to go swimming; I swam on my back and whispered happily into the chlorine-scented air, ‘I’ve got an OBE. I’ve got an OBE!’ Against all the odds I had made it, I had been honoured by the Establishment.
As the Queen was observing mourning for her mother who had just died, it was Prince Charles who performed the presentation at Buckingham Palace that day. And as he pinned on my gong, he said, ‘Oh, I am so delighted to be able to give you this.’ I was delighted too, because we have got to know each other a little over the years. I think perhaps he enjoys my enthusiasm more than his mother did: he has done more than anyone to make me a royalist.
I have to say I think Australia should choose to be a republic, but I would be very happy to have King Charles. It all started when HRH wrote me a lovely letter out of the blue about my 1998 unabridged audiobook of Oliver Twist. It was four pages in his own handwriting. Of course, I wrote back. I always write in pen, on good writing paper. I never take a copy.
I feel protective about Prince Charles. We have met a handful of times over the years but I was amazed when Lindy my agent rang to say, ‘Prince Charles has invited you to go and spend three nights at a house party in Sandringham.’ I said, ‘Give over, that’s nonsense.’ She said, ‘No, really, they contacted us because they didn’t know your home address. They’ve sent a long list of all the things that you might need to wear.’