Short Story: Her Amazingness The Queen Of…

Short Story: Her Amazingness The Queen Of The Forth Road Bridge

I don’t think I slept much the night before, I don’t think any of us did, though nobody would admit it. Well I mean I was going to see the Queen, I believe I was eight, no I was seven, definitely seven years old, but I was going to be eight later that month, anyway I was going to see the Queen.

My mother and father had conveniently omitted of course to mention the distinct possibility that there was going to be another ninety eight thousand people, also going to see the Queen, but I wasn’t told that the previous day. Now that I am a parent I understand that your kids don’t need to know the small details, just tell them the big stuff. The big stuff usually gets the kids of your back, at least for a second or two before the questions start coming back at you like machine gun bullets, what if, who is, will we, oh just shut up for a minute please.

We didn’t have formal clothes to wear, what, a working class Edinburgh family in the nineteen sixties, no chance. So it was my school uniform and for my brooding, sulking, hormone filled, pubescent, James Dean lookalike older brother, his school uniform too, not cool man. It must have cramped his style when I think about it now. My mother had some kind of newish, not worn much ‘coat’ to put on, and my dad who hated anything around his neck, and who I think also hated royalty, after his five years in the jungles of Burma, donned a stiff, thick suit, tie and a flat cap. The ‘bunnet’ as it was colloquially known, the flat cap he was never without, or his brylcreemed head was never ‘withunder’, it must have been his ‘black’, his go to comfort blanket.

It was September, I was still on the summer school holiday, but it was hot, but then again aren’t all the summers in your memory hot and clear and blue and just absolutely perfect. Now I remember why we didn’t sleep the night before, it wasn’t the collective mass hysterical excitement of my family seeping into our psyche, the accumulated anticipation of seeing the royal personage up close, it was the fact that in the summer the prefab, that was our palace, was like an oven, and in the winter it was like a fridge; ah how emphatically well they looked after us, those kind, compassionate, empathetic Edinburgh councilors of the nineteen sixties, what fine upstanding men and women they must have been, no sarcasm intended, no really, no cynicism or derision, honestly.

So the journey began, the three hour trek to see The Queen, or was it to see The Forth Road Bridge. Oh yes that was it, my father had been working for the company who had built the shiny new magnificent roadway, the roadway that swept majestically over the Firth of Forth in an arc of steel and cement, contemporary cutting edge design, but he only worked as the head storekeeper, still he was connected, sort of, to the new bridge.

Three buses, many arguments and many cigarettes later we were deposited at the south end of the Forth Road Bridge, but where the hell was it. The fog had not lifted that morning and the bridge was hidden, a thick summery soup of fog was hanging like a heavy brown blanket over the newest Scottish engineering marvel. A sense of anti-climax was building in both my cool brothers’ heart and mine too, although I wouldn’t know what an anti-climax was, me being just seven.

The realization that I might not be the only one to see the Queen had begun to hit me earlier in the long lasting voyage, when the bus taking us on the magical excursion to South Queensferry was as full as a bus could possibly be. Eventually, after to me, what had seemed like three time zones of travel, the bus of heaving humanity dumped us unceremoniously onto a large area of tarmac where we were made to forage for information of what the hell was going on.

After some chatting between my mother and father a collective decision had been made that we would extend our travel parameters even further by walking on to the bridge to get a clearer, closer view of her royal majesticness.

The other ninety thousand plus ‘exclusives’ like us seemed to have had the same idea however, so like refugees tramping out of a war torn third world region we joined the many, to be able to closely view the few. Dad led the way, mother followed as did I and lastly my cool, by now frigid, teenage brother, who would have liked to have been anywhere else but with us on a hot foggy September morning, wearing his school uniform and being ordered to, cheer up son.

All of a sudden it became exciting to me, as the huge structure loomed up before my eyes, out of the Scotch mist rose the most fabulous monument I had ever seen. I forgot that my legs were sore, that my mother was complaining about her feet and that my brother was now one hundred yards behind us. My father decided to call a halt to the ascent, the assault on the sparkling, new, but steeply inclined walkway, he was setting up our base camp, about time, my mother had spat out in his direction, but under her breath.

There we were in the centre of the Forth Road Bridge, the location that all of the British media would be focused on that day, at least for a few minutes. It was eerily silent, partly because most of the others, the common masses, had sensibly given up, knowing they would have to walk all the way back to where they had come from.

The morning mist then began to lift, like it was pre-arranged with the royal household, it just blew away. My exhausted yet ever patient mother almost keeled over, seems she had some kind of vertigo thing going on inside her ears and when she looked down it frightened her to death. Another meeting between mother and father was quickly arranged and as long as she didn’t look down we were going to hold our position, at least until we had seen ‘the monarch’.

I don’t think I had ever been one hundred and sixty feet high in my life until that moment and it seemed I celebrated by throwing one penny coins over the edge of the bridge down to the churning Firth of Forth, far, far below where we stood, enthusiastically encouraged by my brother who suddenly found an interesting activity for his younger sibling to be blamed for.

I didn’t realise at the time but apparently the Royal Navy had a destroyer moving around underneath the bridge, I think my father could see the headlines in the Edinburgh Evening News, seven year old Edinburgh schoolboy sinks navy’s finest ship in the fleet as one penny goes through funnel, destroying engine and blowing a hole in the bottom of the ship, many missing, more feared dead, the hunt is on for the blazer wearing schoolboy assassin. Hence the sharp painful smack on the back of my head and the threat of more violence should I continue with my bombing activity. My brother innocently moving away from me as the smacks were being dished out, a sly smile on his face, a tearful sulk on mine.

The Chinese whispers had begun, she was here now, the Queen, our Royal Highness was on her way, we were about to catch a fleeting glimpse of our Queen. You know that moment that picture that plays in your head that you can’t really stop, you can rewind it, but sometimes you just can’t switch it off. Well here it goes again.

Suddenly, without a fanfare, or bagpipes, or a loud mouthed man shouting orders, there she was, immediately before us, gliding horizontally, hovering gracefully across the magnificent new bridge. She looked like a God, a Pharaoh, the Buddha, the Dali Lama, the Emperor, the Sultan, the President, there she was, resplendent in blue, it was a bluer than blue, blue, it was sharper than the normal blue you painted with at school, it was an amazing blue.

Angel like, a vision before my young eyes, the Queen, my Queen, our Queen, I could reach out and touch her, but I couldn’t, my mouth was wide open, saliva ran down my chin, I was in a hypnotic state of flux, staring in silence at this royal being, wafting past me, wow, what a moment in my young life.

And there she sat high, high inside the biggest Rolls Royce I had ever seen, it was like Cinderella, there was glass everywhere, the Rolls Royce had a glass roof, a glass back, I never noticed but the wheels must have been glass as well. She poured past me, stately, gently moving in a Rolls Royce, there was still no noise, but this huge car, it must have been a hundred feet wide and fifty feet high, it was the climax, the orgasmic peak of the day was here, and it was just unbelievable, then it was over, she had left me, she was gone.

That was it, that was why we had got up at six am, took three buses, walked for several miles, argued and fought among ourselves, now she was gone, was she coming back, well now my memory fades a little and it ends there. No doubt there were many more tiffs, more arguments, more cigarettes were smoked, before we battled and struggled our collective way home to the comfort of the prefab.

I wonder if she, Elizabeth Regina, Elizabeth Mountbatten-Windsor, I wonder if she recalls much about the day, next time I see her I must ask, but maybe not eh.