The Queen and I

There are some signs of ageing that one can't ignore, however desperately one rams one's head in the sand. Like realising that Archbishops of Canterbury, never mind policemen, are starting to look young. Or the moment when one's children start having facelifts and tummy-tucks. Or, as now, celebrating the Golden Jubilee of a sovereign whom one saw ascend the throne 50 years ago.

How clearly I remember the dawn of the second Elizabethan age. It came on a raw February school day in 1952, when I was nine. A red-haired, freckled boy named Bobby Reynolds (whose soldier father had recently been wounded in the Korean War) turned to me as we settled down for "double singing" in the assembly hall and asked: "Have you heard about the King?"

"What about the King?" "He's dead." The news was devastating. For, although George VI had been the most reticent of sovereigns, I felt I knew him well. I knew how bravely he'd taken on the throne after his older brother's abdication in 1936, facing up to public life despite painful shyness and almost incapacitating stammer.

I knew how he'd refused to leave London during Hitler's wartime Blitz, and had tried to share his subjects' hardships by taking only the fuel-rationed five inches of hot water in his bath. His lean, sad profile on stamps and postal orders seemed still marked by these ordeals, almost - so I used to think - like a death-mask before its time.

King George's funeral plunged Britain into a dark orgy of grief that, to a small boy, seemed to go on for ever. Cinemas and theatres were closed and sporting fixtures cancelled; the radio, which was most people's main source of entertainment, broadcast nothing but hymns and slow marches.

Yet mixed with the grief and gloom was a sense of excitement. For his older daughter, the pretty young woman we knew as Princess Elizabeth, was now to become Britain's first queen-sovereign since Victoria, at the age of only 26.

I remember seeing film of her disembarking from the Comet airliner that had brought her and Prince Philip back from Africa after her father's death. She seemed ridiculously child-like and fragile to be shouldering such awesome responsibility. Even so, I envied her. For at the time my parents were breaking up, and life had suddenly become full of uncertainty. Lucky Princess Elizabeth, I thought, to have the rest of her days so perfectly cut and dried.

Her Coronation on 3 June 1953 was more than the official end of mourning for "George the Good". It was also the symbolic end of postwar austerity and lingering Victorian stuffiness; the threshold to a new, lighter, brighter Britain, blossoming with Picasso-print wallpapers, streamlined cars, chrome coffee pots and G-Plan furniture.

On the great day, as history remembers, midsummer rain poured down. The few thousand Britons who as yet owned television sets invited their friends and neighbours in to see the spectacle transmitted in flickering, bluish black-and-white.

My mother and I watched it in Ryde, Isle of Wight, courtesy of a family called Dorley-Brown, who also invited another family named Tubb. I remember how heavy the crown looked as it was lowered onto our new sovereign's pretty head. And how small and cornered she looked inside the State Coach, like some wild creature in a gold-encrusted trap.

Thereafter, for the best part of three decades, Elizabeth II maintained the lowest profile possible for someone whose countenance adorned every banknote, coin and postage stamp.

In rich and poor, old and young alike, she aroused the same vague feeling of protectiveness. Whatever upsets shook the Royal Family - Princess Margaret's unconstitutional wish to marry a divorced man, Prince Philip's rumoured dalliance with a Mayfair cabaret star - no breath of criticism was uttered against her. "The poor Queen," people would murmur, unaware that they were referring to one of the richest women on Earth.

The 25th year of her reign, 1977, seemed the least likely moment for any patriotic upsurge. "Sunny Jim" Callaghan's torpid Labour government had allowed inflation to reach 27 per cent and newly dignified " industrial action" to run riot through public services now as bloody-minded and indifferent to social damage as any dockers or car workers ever had been.

For me, the most unforgettable scene in that year round "Winter of Discontent" was a frail elderly man being carried on a stretcher from a hospital whose staff had just downed tools. "Just be thankful you've still got your health and strength," he gasped furiously at the pickets standing nearby.

As a soundtrack to strikes by hospitals, firefighters and police - and mountains of uncollected, rotting garbage - came Punk Rock, expressing the nihilistic fury of a young generation whose heritage would be only urban decay and unemployment. Punk's arch-shock troops, the Sex Pistols, went instantly to number one with a screaming parody of the National Anthem, beginning "God Save the Queen/The fascist regime..."

We were a nation stuck hopelessly in the past, greedy for nostalgia products like Country Diary Of An Edwardian Lady, herb pillows and Mrs Bridges' chutney - longing for the carefree Sixties to return and still no nearer contemplating the future than watching George Lucas's original, and best, Star Wars fantasy.

It was hardly a fit time to celebrate anything, let alone a Royal house that seemed to have grown ever more remote from most people's lives and irrelevant to the sad, battered and dingy realm Britain had become.

The palace machine dutifully went through the motions, organising a Silver Jubilee tour that would include the Queen's first visit to a Northern Ireland still at the bloody height of its troubles. A few celebratory mugs and teatowels appeared in the shops. But nobody was holding the front page.

Then something extraordinary happened; a national change of mood that had nothing to do with governmental or media-manipulation and certainly not with the dire state of the nation.

As if for the first time in 25 years, people looked at Elizabeth II and saw what that shy girl on Coronation Day had become. They saw that her 25-year low profile in fact represented modern sovereignty at its highest, a dedication and devotion to duty cut from the same cloth as her father, George VI, and her grandfather, George V.

The appreciated how, through eras of change and instability, one thing at least remained dependable. Whether the setting be a new hospital, dam or safety-pin factory, that Royal car would always appear, punctual to the second.

That diminutive figure in garishly matching hat and coat, would always alight on floaty feet, hand outstretched, to shed a little magic where none was before.

It was one of those moments (the Queen Mother's lying-in-state would be another) when Middle England asserted its quiet but irresistible will. The Silver Jubilee turned shabby, strike-torn, demoralised Britain into scenes as from some sepia Victorian print: strings of Union Jacks instead of strikers' placards; street-parties with home-made cakes and outsize teapots in place of rotting rubbish-piles; communal fun and games in place of individual cynicism and disillusionment. It would eventually be calculated that more people had turned out than on VE Day, the official end of the Second World War in 1945.

I travelled with the Queen on her Jubilee visits to Scotland and Northern Ireland and can bear witness, not only to the rapturous welcome she received at every stop but also to the genuine astonishment it seemed to cause her. That rare smile had never been readier, those startling blue eyes never more wide awake.

Britain at her 50th anniversary would seem several centuries away from those pastoral scenes of bonfires, sackraces and red, white and blue face-paint. Soon to dawn were the Eighties, a decade credited with sweeping away much that was tired and backward-looking and restrictive about Britain, as well as much that was individual and precious.

Certainly, looking back that mere 25 years, the differences in everyday life seem little short of monumental. Then if you wanted to make a telephone call, your best way was to seek out an old red kiosk, usually with someone's old fish-and-chip wrapping, if nothing worse, littering its stone floor. If you wanted a cappuccino, the search was quite a hard one. If you telephoned a company or organisation, a human voice would answer.

The streets may have been dirty and graffiti-infested but, by and large, they were safe. Aids, mad cow disease, road rage and deep-vein thrombosis had yet to be discovered. If you caught a train, it was courtesy of British Rail - an organisation hugely derided but one that usually got you to your destination on time and without any thought of mortal danger. Hatfield, Clapham Junction, Ladbroke Grove, Potters Bar, were just uneventful names flashing past your carriage window.

As for the monarchy, one might think of its two separate quarter centuries as graphs representing public prestige and affection. For the first 25 years, it remained an undeviating horizontal line; for the second, it plunged vertiginously downward.

For my whole lifetime, I have never been other than a staunch royalist, impervious to the sandal wearing republicanism epitomised by The Guardian.

But there were times - during the grotesque Fergie saga, Prince Charles's spectacular fall from grace, and especially the aftermath of Princess Diana's death - when even I fancied I could almost feel the throne wobble.

Throughout that whole Diana nightmare, the Queen was often accused of being inflexible. On the contrary, she seemed only too willing to act on some of the most disastrously bad advice ever given a monarch.

One still squirms to remember her on television, paying tribute to Diana "from my heart" with a face like thunder. And then contritely coming to the Palace gate to watch the funeral cortege pass like some Windsor reincarnation of Ena Sharples.

Her father could have told her how to weather the storm, as could her grandfather: "Just sit tight and say nothing and, whatever it is, it will eventually pass."

It did pass. Diana is now no more than a faint, golden ghost while Elizabeth II remains as tremendous and immovable a fact as ever. She has lightened up a good deal of late and is obviously enjoying a Golden Jubilee whose fervour and merchandising opportunities were never in doubt.

Though privately devastating, the death of her mother helped bring her out of the shadows. In some indefinable way, she has become her own person at last. And the odds against her ever becoming Queen Mother in her turn get longer by the day.

For the rest of us, in the mad and bad new millennium, royal ritual is proving as much a distraction and comfort as it ever was. Our streets may be dangerous, our public transport a shambles. But at least, by golly, we still know better than any other nation on Earth how to make hundreds of guardsmen walk immaculately in step.

I sometimes wish there hadn't been such desperate efforts to make the Jubilee youth-friendly and trendy. I can't say I'm looking forward to Brian May from Queen playing the National Anthem on his electric guitar. It seems hardly less unwelcome than the Sex Pistols' banned 1977 version - but others may disagree.

I need hardly add that I shall be out there with the cheering crowds this weekend. Remembering 50 years ago in the school assembly-hall, when red-haired Bobby Reynolds turned to me and broke the news.