Coronation by Paul Gallico Page B

sciatica, hardening of the arteries, stiffening of the joints, inflammation of the tendons, and anything else she happened to read about in the newspaper advertisements for patent medicines. One had to ask her in the morning whether she felt better, and before going to bed at night whether she thought she was going to be able to sleep. The Claggs never questioned her right to these ills, since she was an aged person and so entitled to them.
    Thus she wished for thunder, lightning and hail, Ossa piled upon Pelion, did Granny, for the sake of the delicious concessions she would wring from Will Clagg, now already reduced to a worm’s level by the catastrophe that she had had the good fortune to forecast.
    True, the old lady also would have liked to have had a glimpse of the Queen for the very reason that her son-in-law had pointed out: she would then have seen two of the great queens of England, one deceased, the other crowned, and remained herself the living link between them. But over and against this disappointment was balanced the perverse delight she would take in telling the story of Will’s idiocy. She was aware that, had all the promises of the day been kept, and she had sat in her window-seat, or even managed to stand along the route of procession with the throng, she would only have seen what everybody else saw. And what was there to tell in that? The narration of this misadventure and of its undoubted consequence would take hours to unfold and would last her as a tea-time topic to her cronies at Morecambe and Little Pudney to her dying day.
    In the meantime, with no objections from either Will Clagg or Violet, who was suffering from the collapse of her husband’s ego as well as everything else, Granny had elected herself captain of the children. She was bossing them unmercifully, yanking at their clothes, pulling them about one moment, commiserating with them the next, fondling and spoiling them with loud and pointed remarks about poor babes brought upon such an expedition, and doling out the small ration of chocolate she had brought along and which was all they had to quiet their hunger.
    The wireless was still their link with the solemn ceremony continuing in the Abbey, and Lionel, succumbing to the will of the majority, was content to leave the instrument tuned to the B.B.C., and in fact was now basking in the attention of all those crowded around trying to hear and in the reflected glory of owning the set. From the expression on his face one might have thought that he had invented radio communication.
    Thus they heard from that great church to which the voice of the commentator transported them momentarily, how the peers of the realm came and knelt at the feet of the woman who a few minutes before had undergone the mystical change that made her for ever a person apart from them all.
    Not only did they kneel, but they performed a gesture symbolic of submission. They folded their hands in an attitude of prayer and placed them between hers, and by so doing bound themselves to her in loyalty everlasting.
     

Led by the Archbishop of Canterbury, followed then by her own husband and the father of her children, Prince Philip, great names remembered from centuries of history bent the knee before her, grey heads bowed and paid their homage. Empty and archaic the ceremony might have seemed in this day and age, but there was still an exquisite and throat-catching beauty connected with it.
    But the procession of peers entitled thus to swear their fealty seemed endless as the lesser ones took their turn, and Lionel said, ‘Ah, it just goes on like that. Come on, let’s go.’ This time he found acquiescence among his friends. He turned the dial again. Debussy emerged from the box and to his dissonants the five of them all moved off, to the regret of those remaining, for with them went their one contact with the Coronation.
    What chocolate the Claggs had with them had been consumed by the children. There was no sign of any