The Uncommon Reader

treated her like an audience, listening to her no longer on the agenda.
    It was not only Gladstone who addressed the Queen as if she was a public meeting.
    The audience this particular Tuesday had followed the usual pattern, and it was only when it was drawing to a close that the Queen managed to get a word in and talk about a subject that actually interested her. “About my Christmas broadcast.”
    “Yes, ma’am?” said the prime minister.
    “I thought this year one might do something different.”
    “Different, ma’am?”
    “Yes. If one were to be sitting on a sofa reading or, even more informally, be discovered by the camera curled up with a book, the camera could creep in — is that the expression? — until I’m in mid-shot, when I could look up and say, “I’ve been reading this book about such and such,” and then go on from there.”
    “And what would the book be, ma’am?” The prime minister looked unhappy.
    “That one would have to think about.”
    “Something about the state of the world perhaps?” He brightened.
    “Possibly, though they get quite enough of that from the newspapers. No. I was actually thinking of poetry.”
    “Poetry, ma’am?” He smiled thinly.
    “Thomas Hardy, for instance. I read an awfully good poem of his the other day about how the Titanic and the iceberg that was to sink her came together. It’s called ‘The Convergence of the Twain’. Do you know it?”
    “I don’t, ma’am. But how would it help?”
    “Help whom?”
    “Well” — and the prime minister seemed a trifle embarrassed actually to have to say it — “the people.”
    “Oh, surely,” said the Queen, “it would show, wouldn’t it, that fate is something to which we are all subject.”
    She gazed at the prime minister, smiling helpfully. He looked down at his hands.
    “I’m not sure that is a message the government would feel able to endorse.” The public must not be allowed to think the world could not be managed. That way lay chaos. Or defeat at the polls, which was the same thing.
    “I’m told,” — and now it was his turn to smile helpfully — “that there is some excellent footage of Your Majesty’s visit to South Africa.”
    The Queen sighed and pressed the bell. “We will think about it.”
    The prime minister knew that the audience was over as Norman opened the door and waited. “So this,” thought the prime minister, “is the famous Norman.”
    “Oh, Norman,” said the Queen, “the prime minister doesn’t seem to have read Hardy. Perhaps you could find him one of our old paperbacks on his way out.”
    Slightly to her surprise the Queen did after a fashion get her way, and though she was not curled up on the sofa but seated at her usual table, and though she did not read the Hardy poem (rejected as not ‘forward-looking’), she began her Christmas broadcast with the opening paragraph of A Tak of Two Cities (“It was the best of times. It was the worst of times”) and did it well, too. Choosing not to read from the autocue but from the book itself, she reminded the older ones in her audience (and they were the majority) of the kind of teacher some of them could still remember and who had read to them at school.
    Encouraged by the reception given to her Christmas broadcast she persisted with her notion of reading in public, and late one night, as she closed her book on the Elizabethan Settlement, it occurred to her to ring the Archbishop of Canterbury.
    There was a pause while he turned down the TV.
    “Archbishop. Why do I never read the lesson?”
    “I beg your pardon, ma’am?”
    “In church. Everybody else gets to read and one never does. It’s not laid down, is it? It’s not off-limits?”
    “Not that I’m aware, ma’am.”
    “Good. Well in that case I’m going to start. Leviticus, here I come. Goodnight.”
    The archbishop shook his head and went back to Strictly Come Dancing .
    But thereafter, particularly when she was in Norfolk, and even in Scotland, Her Majesty began to do a regular stint at the lectern. And not merely the lectern. Visiting a Norfolk primary school she sat down on a classroom chair and read a story from Babar to the children. Addressing a City banquet she treated them to a Betjeman poem, impromptu departures from her schedule which enchanted everyone except Sir Kevin, from whom she hadn’t bothered to get clearance.
    Also unscheduled was the conclusion of a tree-planting ceremony. Having lightly dug an oak sapling into