Coronation (14 page)

BOOK: Coronation

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Johnny sat with both hands beneath the fringed chenille table-cloth. His fingers for the hundredth time were memorising the contours of the badge, the crown, the lion, the unicorn, and the word
FIDELIS
. The dream now had taken on an altered quality. Some of the childishness and exaggeration had departed from it. The words of the old gentleman came back to him ‘never relent!’ He was looking ahead and beginning to concentrate upon his future. Some day he would wear that insignia by right. He had begun to grow up.

Granny poured another cup of tea for all of them, heavily sugared for the children, with plenty of milk. Will Clagg measured out a generous portion of gin into each of the three glasses for Granny, Violet and himself. They were all there, safe, sound and snug, and he felt that the occasion called for a speech, and he gathered his resources together to make it. In some subtle way he had been re-established as head of the family, his person and authority once more looked up to. He eyed them gravely and cleared his throat to let them know he was about to say something, and was rewarded with satisfactory silence and attention.

‘Well,’ he began, ‘it has been quite a day.’ He wondered how it was possible for a man to have so many hundreds of thoughts coursing through his head and yet be able to express so little. To have to sum up all that he had felt about paying homage to his Queen, the strange love that had stirred in him, and all the emotions he had felt in one sentence – ‘Well, it has been quite a day’.

‘It didn’t turn out quite as we expected,’ he continued, ‘but then we went, didn’t we? We tried.’

Clagg’s mind suddenly leaped to the newspaper cutting in his wallet and he said, ‘If the Queen reads the newspapers, as I’m sure she does, she’ll know that we tried because what happened to us was written up there. But it doesn’t matter what happened to us. It isn’t us that counts on a day like this, it’s her, and thank God all went well. So we ought to drink a toast to her, and then go to bed.’

There were no disagreements. Johnny was thinking it would be wonderful to be able to make a speech like that, and hoped that some day he could do the same.

Clagg raised his glass of gin in the direction of the coloured photograph over the mantlepiece and proposed ‘To Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth the Second. God save and bless her!’ The two women lifted their glasses likewise.

‘Wait a minute,’ said Will Clagg, and with a spoon he tipped a few drops of gin into the tea-cups of his son and daughter.

‘There now,’ he said. ‘Properly! All of us!’

PAUL GALLICO
was born in New York City, of Italian and Austrian parentage, in 1897, and attended Columbia University. From 1922 to 1936 he worked on the
New York Daily News
as sports editor, columnist, and assistant managing editor. In 1936 he bought a house on top of a hill at Salcombe in South Devon and settled down with a Great Dane and twenty-three assorted cats. It was in 1941 that he made his name with
The Snow Goose
, a classic story of Dunkirk which became a worldwide bestseller. Having served as a gunner’s mate in the US Navy in 1918, he was again active as a war correspondent with the American Expeditionary Force in 1944. Gallico, who later lived in Monaco, was a first-class fencer and a keen sea-fisherman.

He wrote over forty books, four of which were the adventures of Mrs Harris:
Mrs Harris Goes to Paris
(1958),
Mrs Harris Goes to New York
(1959),
Mrs Harris MP
(1965) and
Mrs Harris Goes to Moscow
(1974), all of which have been reissued by Bloomsbury Publishing. One of the most prolific and professional of American authors, Paul Gallico died in July 1976.

By the Same Author

Mrs Harris Goes to Paris & Mrs Harris Goes to New York

Mrs Harris MP

Mrs Harris Goes to Moscow

First published in Great Britain by William Heinemann Ltd 1962

This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

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