by Sue Townsend
“Do I have your permission to leave?” she said.
“Certainly,” said Jack, with a small incline of the head.
The Queen left the room and walked along the corridors. As she did so, she read the list of things she could take with her and the specifications of her new home.
9 HELLEBORE CLOSE
FLOWERS ESTATE
GENERAL INFORMATION:
This two-bedroomed, semi-detached, pre-war property situated in the area of the Flowers Estate, has been recently redecorated throughout and briefly comprises: Front Entrance, Entrance Hall, Lounge, Kitchen, Bathroom, Landing, Two Bedrooms, Boxroom and Separate W.C. To the outside, driveway and front and rear garden.
ACCOMMODATION:
Ground Floor
Front Entrance: with door to entrance hall:
Entrance Hall: with stairs to first floor, storage cupboard.
Lounge: 14’ 10’ x 12’ 7’ with gas fire point.
Kitchen: 9’ 6’ x 9’ 9’ requiring fitments but including sink, gas cooker point and door to rear.
Bathroom: with two-piece suite comprising: cast iron bath, wash hand basin, partly tiled walls, frosted window and boiler.
First Floor
Landing: with access to loft space.
Bedroom 1: 13’ 1’ x 10’ 1’
Bedroom 2: 9’ 5’ x 9’ 2’
Boxroom: 6’ x 6’
Separate W.C.: with low level W.C. and frosted window.
OUTSIDE:
The property is approached by pathway with garden and path to side entrance, together with garden to rear.
PLEASE NOTE:
We can give no warranty as to whether or not any boiler or heating⁄water system to the property is operational.
∨ The Queen and I ∧
3
NEVER SO HUMBLE
It was dusk when the furniture van drew up outside Number Nine Hellebore Close. The Queen looked stonily at her new home. The house looked grimly back through the gloom, as though it bore a grudge. Its windows were boarded. Somebody violent and strong had driven in six-inch nails and connected hardboard panels to the window frames. A small sycamore tree was growing from the upstairs guttering.
The Queen adjusted her headscarf and straightened her back. She looked at the mean front door: our furniture will never fit through, she thought, and we will have to share a wall what was the technical term? Something celebratory. A party wall, that was it! The door of Number Eleven opened and a man in a tee shirt and overalls came out and stood on his concrete step. A woman joined him, blonde and fleshy, wearing clothes a size too small and red fluffy mules. The fluff waved about in the evening breeze, looking like creatures on the sea bed searching for plankton.
The man and the woman were husband and wife Beverley and Tony Threadgold the Queen’s new neighbours. They gawped at the removal van, not bothering to disguise their curiosity. The house next door to them had been empty for over a year so the Threadgolds had enjoyed the luxury of comparative privacy. They’d shouted, banged doors and made love without vocal restraint, and now it was over. It was a sad day for them. They hoped their new neighbours would be reasonably, but not too, respectable.
The driver of the removal van went round and opened the door for the Queen. She climbed down, grateful for the volume of material in her tweed skirt.
“Come on, Philip,” she encouraged, but Philip sat on, in the front of the van, clutching his briefcase to him, as though it were a hot water bottle and he were a hypothermia victim.
“Philip, this gentleman has a family to go home to.”
The driver was pleased to be called a gentleman by the Queen.
“No ‘urry,” he said, graciously.
But in truth he couldn’t wait to get back to his own council house, to tell his wife about the journey up the M1. About how he and the Queen had talked of homeopathic medicine and dogs and the problems of adolescent children.
“I’ll give you an ‘and in with your stuff,” he offered.
“How kind, but the Republican Party suggested that my husband and I must get used to coping for ourselves.”
The driver confided, “Nobody in our house voted for ‘em. We always vote Conservative, always.”
The Queen confided, “Somebody in our house supported them.”
The driver nodded towards Prince Philip. “Not ‘im?”
The Queen laughed at the thought.
A second removal van roared into the close. The doors opened immediately and the Queen’s grandchildren climbed out. The Queen waved and the little boys ran towards her. Prince Charles helped his wife out of the van. Diana had dressed for adversity: denim and cowboy boots. She looked at Number Eight Hellebore Close and shuddered. But Prince Charles smiled. Here, at last, was the simple life.
∨ The Queen and I ∧
4
POSHOS
The street sign at the entrance to the Close had lost five black metal letters. HELL CLOSE it now said, illuminated by the light of a flickering street lamp.
The Queen thought, “Yes, it is Hell, it must be, because I’ve never seen anything like it in the whole of my waking life.”
She had visited many council estates had opened community centres, had driven through the bunting and the cheering crowds, alighted from the car, walked on red carpets, been given a posy by a two-year-old in a ‘Mothercare’ party frock, been greeted by tongue-tied dignitaries, pulled a cord, revealed a plaque, signed the visitors’ book. Then, carpet, car, drive to helicopter and up, up and away. She’d seen the odd documentary on BBC2 about urban poverty, heard unattractive poor people talk in broken sentences about their dreadful lives, but she’d regarded such programmes as sociological curiosities, on a par with watching the circumcision ceremonies of Amazonian Indians, so far away that it didn’t really matter.
It stank. Somebody in the Close was burning car tyres. The acrid smoke drifted sluggishly over a rooftop. Not one house in the Close had its full complement of windows. Fences were broken, or gone. Gardens were full of rubbish, black plastic bags had been split by ravenous dogs, televisions flickered and blared. A police car drove into the Close and stopped. A policeman pulled a youth off the pavement, threw him into the back of the car and sped away with the youth struggling in the back. A man lay under a wreck of a car which was jacked up on bricks. Other men squatted close by, aiming torches and watching, men with outdated haircuts and tattoos, their cigarettes cupped in their hands. A woman in white stilettoes ran down the road after a boy toddler, naked apart from his vest. She yanked the child by his fat little arm back into the house.
“Now gerrin’ and stay in,” she screamed. “Oo left the bleedin’ door open?” she demanded of other, unseen children.
The Queen was reminded of the stories that Crawfie would tell in the nursery at teatime. Of goblins and witches, of strange lands populated by sinister people. The Queen would beg her governess to stop, but she never would.
“Och awa’ wi’ you,” she’d laugh. “You’re far too soft.” Crawfie never spoke or laughed like that in Mama’s presence.
The Queen thought, Crawfie knew. She knew. She was preparing me for Hell Close.
William and Harry ran up and down the Close, excited by the novelty of the journey, taking advantage of Nanny’s absence. Ma and Pa were at the front door of a dirty old house, trying to get a key in the lock. William said, “What are you doing, Pa?”
“Trying to get inside.”
“Why?”
“Because we’re going to live here.”
William and Harry laughed loudly. It wasn’t often Pa made a joke. He sometimes put on a silly voice and said things about the Goons and stuff, but mostly he was dead serious. Frowning and giving lectures.
Mama said, “This is our new house.”
William said, “How can it be new when it’s old?”
Again the boys laughed. William lost control and needed support, he leaned against the creosoted fence dividing their house from its neighbour. The t
ired fence gave way under his fragile weight and collapsed. Seeing him there, fallen and shrieking amongst splintered wood, Diana automatically looked for Nanny, who always knew what to do, but Nanny wasn’t there. She bent down and lifted her son from the wreckage. Harry whimpered and clung to the hem of her denim jacket. Charles booted furiously at the front door, which opened, releasing a stench of neglect and damp and ghostly chip fat. He switched on the hall light and beckoned his wife and children inside.
Tony Threadgold lit a cigarette and passed it to his wife. Then he lit one for himself. His good manners were often mocked at the Flowers Estate Working Men’s Club. He had once said, “Excuse me,” as he struggled through the scrum at the bar with a tray of drinks, only to have his sexuality challenged.
“‘Excuse me?”’ mocked a fat man with psychotic eyes. “What are you, a poofter?”
Tony had brought the tray of drinks crashing down on the man’s head: but then had immediately gone to Bev and apologised for the delay in obtaining more drinks. Lovely manners.
The Threadgolds watched as a shadowy figure ordered a tall man out of the van. Was she a foreigner? It wasn’t English she was talking was it? But as their ears became more accustomed they realised it was English, but posh English, really posh.
“Tone, why they moved a posho in Hell Close?” asked Beverley.
“Dunno,” replied Tony, peering into the gloom. “Seen her some where before. Is she Dr Khan’s receptionist?”
“No,” said Beverley (who was always at the doctor’s, so she spoke with some authority), “definitely not.”
“Christ, just our bleedin’ luck to have poshos nex’ door.”
“Least they won’t shit in the bath, like the last lot of mongrels.”
“Yeah, there is that,” conceded Tony.
Prince Philip stared speechlessly at Number Nine. A street light flickered into life, casting a theatrical glow over his dilapidated future home. It continued to flicker as though it belonged in the theatre and was auditioning for a storm at sea. The driver let down the ramp at the back of the van and went inside. He’d never seen such lovely stuff not in twenty-one years of removals. The dog in the cage at the back started to growl and snap and hurl its ferocious little body against the bars.
“They’ve got a dog,” said Tony.
“So long as they keep it under control,” said Beverley. Tony squeezed his wife’s shoulder. She was a good kid, he thought. Tolerant like.
Prince Philip spoke. “It’s abso-bloody-lutely impossible. I refuse. I’d sooner live in a bloody ditch. And that bloody light will send me mad.”
He shouted up at the light which carried on with its storm-at-sea impression, taking on hurricane status when Philip took hold of its post and shook it violently from side to side.
Beverley said, “I got it. He’s a loony, one of them that’s been let out to die in the community.”
Tony watched as Philip ran to the back of the van and screamed at the little dog, “Quiet, Harris! You sodding little turd!”
“You might be right, Bev,” said Tony. They turned to go back into their house when the Queen addressed them.
“Excuse me, but would you have an axe I could borrow?”
“An ix?” repeated Tony.
“Yes, an axe.” The Queen came to their front gate.
“An ix?” puzzled Beverley.
“Yes.”
“I dunno what an ‘ix’ is,” Tony said.
“You don’t know what an axe is?”
“No.”
“One uses it for chopping wood.”
The Queen was growing impatient. She had made a simple request; her new neighbours were obviously morons. She was aware that educational standards had fallen, but not to know what an axe was…It was a scandal.
“I need an implement of some kind to gain access to my house.”
“Arse?”
“House!”
The driver volunteered his services as translator. His hours talking to the Queen had given him a new found linguistic confidence.
“This lady wants to know if you’ve got a axe.”
“Yeah, I got a axe, but I ain’t ‘anding it over to ‘im,” said Tony, pointing at Philip. The Queen came down the garden path towards the Threadgolds and the light from their hall illuminated her face. Beverley gasped and curtsied clumsily. Tony reeled back and clutched the lintel of the front door for support before saying, “It’s out the back, I’ll geddit.”
Left alone, Beverley burst into tears.
“It was the shock,” she said later, as she and Tony lay in bed unable to sleep.
“I mean, who would believe it? I still don’t believe it, Tone.”
“Nor do I, Bev. I mean, the Queen next door. We’ll put in for a transfer, eh?”
Slightly comforted, Beverley went to sleep.
It was Tony Threadgold who had prised the boards from the front door, but it was Prince Philip who had taken the key from his wife, turned it in the lock and entered the house. It was ludicrously small, of course.
“I had a wendy house bigger than this,” said the Queen, as she peered into the main living room.
“We’ve had bloody cars bigger than this,” said Prince Philip as he stomped up the stairs. The whole interior was papered with anaglypta. It had been painted magnolia throughout. “Very nice,” said the driver. “Clean.”
Tony Threadgold said, “Yeah, after the Smiths were chucked out, the council cleaning squad ‘ad to come in. Wore protective clothing like, and those ‘elmets what gives oxygen. Filthy bleeders the Smiths were. So you’re lucky, you got it all done up, decorated.”
Beverley brought five mugs of strong tea round from next door. She gave the uncracked mug to the Queen. Prince Philip got the next best, the one with Alton Towers written on it. She gave herself the worst, the one with the slow leak which said, ‘A BONK A DAY KEEPS THE DOCTOR AWAY’. The telephone rang, startling them all. Prince Philip located it inside the gas meter cupboard.
“It’s for you,” he said, handing the receiver to his wife.
Jack Barker was on the line. “How do you like it?” he said.
“I don’t like it. Anyway, how do you like it, Mr Barker?”
“Like what?”
“Downing Street. It’s an awful lot of work. All those red boxes.”
“Red boxes!” scoffed Barker. “I’ve got better things to do than faff about with them. Goodnight.”
The Queen put the phone down and said, “We’d better start bringing in the furniture, hadn’t we?”
∨ The Queen and I ∧
5
KITCHEN CABINET
At ten o’clock, Tony Threadgold plugged the Queen’s television into the cracked wall socket and after jiggling about with the aerial socket, switched the set on.
“Uh, cowin’ politics,” he said, as Jack Barker’s face swam onto the screen.
Tony went to turn the set off, but the Queen said, “No, please leave it on.” And she sat back to watch.
It was the first time that the kitchen of Number Ten Downing Street had been used in a Prime Ministerial Broadcast. Jack’s new cabinet six women, six men sat around the large kitchen table, trying to look relaxed. Jack sat in a Windsor chair at the head of the table, facing the camera. Official-looking papers, coffee cups, a bowl of fruit and small vases of garden flowers had been artfully arranged by the director of the broadcast to suggest a business-like informality.
Jack’s denim shirt sleeves were rolled to the elbow. His already handsome features had been further enhanced by subtle touches of colour. His accent combined the flattened vowels of the north with the crisper intonation of the south. He knew his smile was good, he used it often. He had alarmed his civil servants by telling them that he intended to write his own speeches and it was his own speech that he was reading now on the autocue. Even to his own ears it sounded stilted and ridiculous. But it was too late to change it now:
Citizens! We are no longer subjects! Every man, woman and chil
d in the land can raise their heads higher today, free at last of the pernicious class system that has poisoned our society for so long. From this day forward, all ranks, titles and positions of privilege are abolished. Citizens will be known only as Mr, Mrs, Ms or Miss.
♦
The parasitic Royal Family are to be relocated to an area where they will live ordinary lives amongst ordinary people. It will be a criminal offence to curtsey, bow, or to address them with other than the aforesaid forms of address. Their lands, properties, pictures, furniture, jewels, breeding stock, etc, etc, etc, belong, in their entirety, to the State. People wishing to ingratiate themselves with the former Royal Family are advised that such behaviour, should it come to the notice of the authorities, will be punished.
♦
However, the ex-Royal Family will be protected by the laws of the land. Anybody intimidating, threatening or abusing them, or causing them harm, or invading their privacy will be dealt with in the criminal courts. It is to be hoped that the members of the ex-Royal Family will integrate themselves into their local community, find employment and become useful members of society something they have not been for many hundreds of years.
♦
The Crown Jewels are to be auctioned at Sotheby’s as soon as arrangements are completed. The proceeds from this sale will go towards maintaining Britain’s housing stock. The Japanese government has shown interest in this sale. It is not true that the Crown Jewels are ‘priceless’. Everything has a price.
♦
So, fellow citizens, hold your head high. You are no longer subjugated.
“Well, what did you think?” said Jack.
“You sounded a bit poncy,” said Pat Barker. They were sitting up in bed in Number Ten Downing Street. The bed was piled high with documents and draft proposals and official and personal letters. A fax machine spewed out information, congratulations and abuse. The click of the ansafone was a constant background noise. Jack had spoken to the American President five minutes previously. The President had assured Jack that he had ‘never been comfortable with your monarchy, Jack’.
