The last day of August, a Sunday, eight in the morning. Like many people in Britain, I was asleep. The bedside radio came on. A solemn voice, a plain sentence or two, the tune of ‘God Save the Queen’ played at its most mournful pitch. (There are two versions of the British national anthem kept at every radio station: solemn and triumphant.)
‘Did you hear that?’ said my partner, who was waking beside me.
I had. The BBC had done a fine job on our slumbering reflexes. The news was more than merely important or shocking – a plane crash, an IRA bomb. Its delivery evoked feelings more awkward than sadness and surprise. The national memory was being awoken; the story that the nation tells about itself. And because the national memory has become increasingly blurred and contested, it was interesting to discover the old version still alive in oneself, to realise how much of it one knew and felt bound up with. Reflexively, I thought of the pre-war prime minister Neville Chamberlain and his tight little speech on the radio on another Sunday morning – in September 1939 – which disclosed that Britain was at war with Germany: ‘I am speaking to you from the Cabinet Room at Number Ten Downing Street.’ It was ridiculous to think of this. It happened six years before I was born; and Britain, on 31 August 1997, was not at war with Germany, with anyone (though for a day or two the enemy was identified as freelance photographers, helpfully known by a foreign word, the paparazzi). But the happenings that come into the category of supreme national moments have a grammar of their own, literally so. The BBC announcer usually said, ‘You’re listening to BBC Radio 4,’ but that morning he said, ‘This is the BBC,’ and with that small reversion from modern, market-minded informality to old-fashioned authority so the death of the Princess of Wales became linked to Mr Chamberlain, air raids on the Ruhr (six of our aircraft are missing), the conquest of Everest, the Falklands War.
Or at least it did in my half-awake mind, not that I noticed the reason at the time. My partner said: ‘I feel so sorry for those poor boys.’
We went downstairs and watched television. Eventually the prime minister, Tony Blair, came on and spoke for the first time of ‘the People’s Princess’. Some journalists later wrote that the phrase had been invented for the occasion by Blair’s press secretary (which may well be true, his press secretary having previously worked in tabloid newspapers), but at the time it seemed to fall quite naturally in his statement, in which emotion seemed to battle with articulacy. I write ‘seemed’ but that does not mean I doubted his sincerity; it was just that, having followed his election campaign, I knew how well he could deploy sincerity in his well-considered outbreaks of spontaneity.
We had lunch. My partner explained to our five-year-old daughter that the princess had died. Our daughter asked: ‘Is that the woman you said was awful?’ We wondered where we should take the children in the afternoon. The television had pictures of people outside Buckingham Palace, some of them crying. We remembered that the pond in St James’s Park had ducks, and that this part of London – central, royal, institutional London – can be enjoyed by the people who live in London as well as by the tourists who have claimed it and made it their own. Also, we were curious – who were these people who had gone to the palace? – but I do not think coldly inquisitive. We were perhaps just a little sad.
We drove. The traffic was thick. The Mall had been closed to all but pedestrians. We parked the car near the monument to the Duke of York and walked down the steps and into the Mall. Whenever I drive down this avenue – always in a car or a taxi; nothing so vulgar as a bus route pollutes it – I am always surprised to see Buckingham Palace, the memorial to Queen Victoria, Horse Guards Parade, the minor palaces and mansions, the statues of explorers, the friezes of army regiments, the sentry boxes, the immobile sentries in scarlet uniforms and black bearskin hats. My surprise is that I live in the same city, so close to this fabled history which in my childhood looked so grand and far away and could only be represented in my home with model soldiers. And yet (another surprise when one investigates it) the setting is not so very historical. There are people still alive who can remember this imperial cityscape under construction. My own father, had he lived in London at that time, could have watched as a boy as masons chiselled the Portland stone of the new facade to Buckingham Palace (finished in 1913), or the bronze statue to Captain Cook (1914) was unveiled, or Admiralty Arch (1910) had its keystones put in place. He could have been there on the day in 1911 when King George V stood beside the new Queen Victoria Memorial and tapped its designer on the shoulder with a sword, transforming him into a knight: Sir Thomas Brock. And then this small boy, my father, could have turned and walked down the new Mall, with its plane trees, flagpoles and galleon-topped lamp posts, which was widened to make a processional route and pushed through to Trafalgar Square in the same year.
This, then, is a twentieth-century stage, post-Victorian, the whole planned as a tribute to the dead queen; as traditional and historic as the machine gun or an early Mercedes.
We did not go to the palace directly. We crossed the Mall and went into the park. How would I describe the situation here? I would say it was normal. The afternoon was fine. Tourists strolled around the lake, young people with backpacks scattered bread for the ducks. For a time, our children stood on the bridge and threw pebbles into the water. A pair of handsome swans and some cygnets slid by. Then, as we lay on the grass, I noticed a little black girl in a bed of roses. She had scissors in her right hand and a small bundle of rose blooms in her left. She was snipping more blooms cleanly and quietly.
I went across to her.
‘You know you shouldn’t be doing that, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I know.’ Her scissors went on snipping.
A quandary for the civic-minded. She might have a father, or several tough brothers, out of sight behind a tree. I summoned some courage.
‘Well, don’t do it then.’
She skipped off up the slope to the Mall, where she ran alongside the people who were walking towards the palace and looked up into their faces and offered her flowers. As nobody took them, money may have been involved. She was too far away to hear.
We saw her again among the crowd – then still small – which had gathered in front of the palace railings. She was with a woman, probably her mother, who looked like a Somali. The roses had gone; they must have been on the pile, but the crowd was too thick in front of the flowers to see. The Somali woman stood reverently, I thought, near a mounted policeman who was guiding the flower-bringers to a route which ran along the front of the railings to the place where their flowers could be left. People were arriving with bunches every couple of minutes. The people without flowers looked at these people with flowers. They were the spectacle; there was nothing much else to see. The palace yard was empty apart from the sentries, who occasionally stamped and banged their rifles down and picked them up again, and the palace as usual presented its blank, mysterious face to the world. If the Queen and her family had been at home, it would have looked the same – she does not come to the windows and wave, toodle-oo – but in any case the Queen and her family were on their Scottish holidays in Balmoral.
Further off, behind the Victoria Memorial, hot-dog and ice-cream sellers and television crews had parked their vans. On the memorial itself, men in T-shirts had begun to set up scaffolding for television cameras, their steel tubes rattling on the marble, of which the memorial contains 2,300 tons. We climbed the steps towards Queen Victoria, who is seated, but measures thirteen feet high, and is surrounded by allegorical figures. Above her, winged Victory with Courage and Constancy at Victory’s feet. Beside her, Trust facing south, Justice north and Charity west. The queen herself faces east, away from the palace and down the Mall towards her city, her empire, her people.
I had never been here before. It was fascinating; how unlikely it was that one small woman in one small country could represent so much universal principle, at least in the eyes of Sir Thomas Brock. People leaned in the sun on the memorial’s balconies and, though I overheard one or two quiet conversations about the dead princess, their behaviour suggested attitudes like our own. They licked ice cream. They were perhaps a little sad, but mainly they seemed curious. Later on television we would all be described as mourners. Meanwhile, pole by pole, the television platforms rose up towards Charity and the two marble children she clutched at her knee.
We walked back down the Mall. I noticed that many people going the other way and carrying flowers were black or brown, Africans and African Caribbeans, Asians. I remembered how sixteen years before I had been a reporter at the princess’s wedding and how, walking the processional route between the palace and St Paul’s, I had seen very few black faces in the crowds. I now remembered writing that, and also a remark about the national anthem being a rotten tune, which had been circled on the galley proofs by the paper’s editor with a line drawn to his note in the margin: No, a jolly good tune in my opinion!
It seemed long ago; the post-war height of the monarchy’s popularity, when newspapers thought royalty could do no wrong and there was a frenzy of good wishes in the streets. We drove home through a city which had changed since then, and (I thought, that day) in some ways for the better.
Later that night the telephone rang. It was a friend who edits a weekly magazine. Could I write 2,500 words on Diana by the next evening?
‘But I don’t know anything about her,’ I said. ‘What could I write about?’
‘You know – Diana the Icon,’ he said.
‘The Icon? How do you mean?’
‘You know – the clothes, the busted marriage, bulimia, landmines, Aids, all those things. What she meant to us all.’
No, I said, I didn’t really think I could.
‘Look at it another way,’ he said, ‘it’s worth the price of a new kitchen.’
A new kitchen! Even cheap ones, I thought, came in at about £6,000. And perhaps my friend was thinking bigger than that, somewhere up in the Smallbone range.
A kitchen for 2,500 words. In such small ways does an event become a phenomenon.
September was not a good month for those who imagined that human society is, or might one day be, governed by reason. After the People’s Princess came the People’s Mall, the People’s Funeral, the People’s Earl (Spencer), the People’s Europe, the People’s Television Channel (BBC1), all of them promoted and discussed without irony. In London, a man applied to the International Star Registry to have a star in the Andromeda constellation named ‘Diana – the People’s Princess’ (another application wanted a star in the Lyra constellation named ‘Dodi and Diana – Eternally Loved’). The leader of the Conservative Party, William Hague, suggested that Heathrow Airport be renamed Diana Airport. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, was said to be seriously considering a proposal that the August Bank Holiday be renamed Diana Day. Letters to newspapers made other suggestions for the renaming of hospitals and coins, for statues, for fountains, for special stamps. Three foreign tourists were sentenced to jail for taking old teddy bears from the tributes to the princess which had been heaped on various pavements (none in fact served their sentences, but one was punched by an onlooker on leaving the court). The wholesale price of flowers rose by 25 per cent in the London markets, despite special shipments from the polythene growing-tunnels of Holland, Israel, Africa and South America. By 9 September, 10,000 tons of them had been piled outside Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace. Estimates of the number of individual blooms reached 50 million. Estimates of the total weight of tributes reached 15,000 tons, if cards, bottles of champagne, trinkets, teddy bears and items of crockery bearing Diana’s picture were included. Public-health officers estimated that the temperature inside these masses of vegetation, cellophane and paper could be 180 degrees Fahrenheit. People waited for up to eight hours to sign the books of condolence and the queue in the Mall sometimes stretched for three-quarters of a mile. As of 15 September, Buckingham Palace had received 500,000 letters and 580,000 email messages of sympathy. By 30 September, 3 million CDs of Elton John singing the song that he had sung at the funeral had been sold in the United Kingdom (21 million copies had been pressed worldwide; the profits went to charity). Ten new or revised books about the princess had been published (two of them headed the lists of hardback and paperback bestsellers). T-shirts, tea towels, videos, ‘antique bronzed’ busts, commemorative plates and medals were also doing well. The press-clippings agency, Durrants, said that the coverage in the world’s magazines and newspapers by far exceeded that generated by any other event, anywhere in the world, at any time in history.
Could grief for one woman have caused all this? We were told so, and it is true that personal grief can have odd, rippling effects: Queen Victoria, mourning her husband, set a fashion for black dress in Britain that was copied throughout Europe. This, on the other hand, was not the replication of clothes but a multiplication of tears. People on television and in the newspapers said that they grieved more for the Princess of Wales than they had for their wives or husbands. It seemed unbelievable, and yet for a time it was difficult in Britain to question it. There was an oppression of grief. People had not only to grieve, they had to be seen to grieve, and in the most pictorial way, by hugging and kissing. The Queen and her family were not seen to grieve enough. They were told to grieve more, and not only by tabloid newspapers (Show us you care, Ma’am! ). The Times told her that she went against the public mood at her peril. The Independent said that it would welcome the sight of the royal family in tears and holding on to one another on the steps of Westminster Abbey. The argument became metaphorical, sociological, psychological and political. ‘New Labour’, a piece of highly successful political rebranding invented by marketeers, spoke for ‘New Britain’. New Britain was the princess, the prime minister, flowers, compassion and the therapeutic benefits of touching and crying – Modernity, if the princess gets a memorial like Victoria. Old Britain was the Queen, her son and heir, pensioners with ‘stiff upper lips’, reticence and the neurosis brought about by repression – History on the same memorial. As a depiction of 60 million individuals, it was as accurate as Mrs Miniver had been in 1942 or Swinging London in 1966; but it became accepted wisdom that the nation had crossed some kind of emotional fault line.
Two questions arose. Outside the personal sorrow of those who knew the princess, what kind of grief were people feeling? And how many people were feeling it? To judge the quality of other people’s grief may be a risky enterprise, but my guess about the first is this: that it was recreational grieving (‘look-at-me’ grief was how the writer Julian Barnes described it), that it was enjoyable, that it promoted the griever from the audience to an on-stage part in the final act of the opera, which lasted six days. The dead heroine had provided the most marvellous story, and the grief of her spectators may have been genuine in the sense of unfaked. But it was grief with the pain removed, grief-lite. When people telephoned each other that Sunday morning, they spoke eagerly – ‘Have you heard that . . . ?’ – and not with the dread – ‘How can I tell him that . . . ?’ – familiar to bearers of seriously wounding news, which the hearer may recover from only in months or years or sometimes never at all. It was possible, after all, for the readers of Dickens to weep at the death of Little Nell, whom they too felt they knew.
In September, in the week that separated her death from her funeral, it was sacrilege to talk openly in this way. I don’t think I exaggerate this. The public mood, as relayed and reinforced by the media, became vindictive towards dissension. To be sceptical was to be unfeeling. Organisations which thought that life might go on as normal, as the Scottish football authorities did with an international match that was to be played on the same day (though not at the same time) as the funeral, became enemies of this thing, the public mood. Politicians and newspapers pilloried them and their ways were corrected. And yet privately – or so it seemed to me – it was difficult to meet people who fully shared the emotion that we were meant to feel. Letters began to appear in a few newspapers which suggested another kind of community; the angry, puzzled and beleaguered, the people who were not quite sad enough. How many of them were there – were we? No reliable quantification can exist. In Britain, 31 million people watched the funeral on television, about half the population, but watching (as I did) and feeling tearful (as I did) is no indicator of grief. Still, it was the largest audience that British television has ever had. According to the BBC, the next largest – 30.1 million – was for an episode of the soap, EastEnders, in which Angie the barmaid was served divorce papers by Dirty Den.
Originally published in Granta 60, 1997
‘Those Who Felt Differently’, by Ian Jack. © Ian Jack, 1997. Reproduced with permission.
Photograph © Peter Marlow / Magnum Photos, The cortège at Scratchwood services on the M1 motorway
