The Queen, the coronation, and a box with a little window

I was five when my father drove us from rural Sussex into the heart of London town. It was two days before the coronation. With the hood down, my two brothers (three and seven years old) and I were squashed on the worn red leather back seat. The car was an open Hudson Terraplane Eight – an exotic American barouche.

We had made our way to the Victoria memorial right in front of Buckingham Palace. In those days cars circulated round “Old Vic”, and I seem to remember that there was a swirl of almost stationary traffic moving sluggishly from there up and down the Mall.

We had a huge advantage over the “closed” cars that we found on either side of us, because in amongst us were corporation dustcarts full of refuse workers. The dustcarts were contraptions with a semi circular super-structure, and sliding lids through which the rubbish was normally tipped.

But each of the openings was full of capped smiling workers’ faces. They were throwing what seemed to be vast quantities of boiled sweets at us. I counted 10 barley sugars in my lap, and could see other children with arms outstretched from their car windows trying to grasp for more.

Two days later I was taken to the tobacco smoke-filled room of a neighbour who had a device I had never seen before. It was a television. I confess I have written about it before.

There was this vast wooden box in the corner of the room. It had a walnut facia, and a little window in the front. The little window was perhaps 10 inches by eight. Maybe I exaggerate its smallness. The sound was loud, but the picture in the little window was fuzzy and grey, with occasional diagonal line of interference.

I remember glimpsing a gloved hand, the outline of a coach, the sound of horse, music, and blurred faces. My father tut-tutted of the device: “This will never catch on.”  This was my coronation.

Little did I know that one day that “little window” would grow far, far, bigger and that one day I would be peering out of it.

Yesterday, on the 60th anniversary of the coronation, I found myself cycling along Regent Street. For a moment, I thought I was cycling beneath a gigantic advertisement for Silk Cut cigarettes. The trademark purple was everywhere.

Then I realised, that each of these identical purple and gold flags was to remind us of the coronation. So I came to remember that long day 60 years ago, trundling around in that open-topped car, hoarding barley sugars.

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