The Uncommon Reader

(gymnastics in Nuneaton), the Queen gave Norman her Nancy Mitford to return, telling him that there was apparently a sequel and she wanted to read that too, plus anything else besides he thought she might fancy.
    This commission caused him some anxiety. Well read up to a point, he was largely self-taught, his reading tending to be determined by whether an author was gay or not. Fairly wide remit though this was, it did narrow things down a bit, particularly when choosing a book for someone else, and the more so when that someone else happened to be the Queen.
    Nor was Mr Hutchings much help, except that when he mentioned dogs as a subject that might interest Her Majesty it reminded Norman of something he had read that could fit the bill, J. R. Ackerley’s novel My Dog Tulip . Mr Hutchings was dubious, pointing out that it was a gay book.
    “Is it?” said Norman innocently. “I didn’t realise that. She’ll think it’s just about the dog.”
    He took the books up to the Queen’s floor and, having been told to make himself as scarce as possible, when the duke came by hid behind a boulle cabinet.
    “Saw this extraordinary creature this afternoon,” HRH reported later. “Ginger-stick-in-waiting.”
    “That would be Norman,” said the Queen. “I met him in the travelling library. He used to work in the kitchen.”
    “I can see why,” said the duke.
    “He’s very intelligent,” said the Queen.
    “He’ll have to be,” said the duke. “Looking like that.”
    “Tulip,” said the Queen to Norman later. “Funny name for a dog.”
    “It’s supposed to be fiction, ma’am, only the author did have a dog in life, an Alsatian.” (He didn’t tell her its name was Queenie.) “So it’s really disguised autobiography.”
    “Oh,” said the Queen. “Why disguise it?”
    Norman thought she would find out when she read the book, but he didn’t say so.
    “None of his friends liked the dog, ma’am.”
    “One knows that feeling very well,” said the Queen, and Norman nodded solemnly, the royal dogs being generally unpopular. The Queen smiled. What a find Norman was. She knew that she inhibited, made people shy, and few of the servants behaved like themselves. Oddity though he was, Norman was himself and seemed incapable of being anything else. That was very rare.
    The Queen, though, might have been less pleased had she known that Norman was unaffected by her because she seemed to him so ancient, her royalty obliterated by her seniority. Queen she might be but she was also an old lady, and since Norman’s introduction to the world of work had been via an old people’s home on Tyneside old ladies held no terrors for him. To Norman she was his employer, but her age made her as much patient as Queen and in both capacities to be humoured, though this was, it’s true, before he woke up to how sharp she was and how much wasted.
    She was also intensely conventional and when she had started to read she thought perhaps she ought to do some of it at least in the place set aside for the purpose, namely the palace library. But though it was called the library and was indeed lined with books, a book was seldom if ever read there. Ultimatums were delivered here, lines drawn, prayer books compiled and marriages decided upon, but should one want to curl up with a book the library was not the place. It was not easy even to lay hands on something to read, as on the open shelves, so called, the books were sequestered behind locked and gilded grilles. Many of them were priceless, which was another discouragement. No, if reading was to be done it were better done in a place not set aside for it. The Queen thought that there might be a lesson there and she went back upstairs.
    Having finished the Nancy Mitford sequel, Love in a Cold Climate ., the Queen was delighted to see she had written others, and though some of them seemed to be history she put them on her (newly started) reading list, which she kept in her desk. Meanwhile she got on with Norman’s choice, My Dog Tulip by J. R. Ackerley. (Had she met him? She thought not.) She enjoyed the book if only because, as Norman had said, the dog in question seemed even more of a handful than hers and just about as unpopular. Seeing that Ackerley had written an autobiography, she sent Norman down to the London Library to borrow it. Patron of the London Library, she had seldom set foot in it and neither, of course, had Norman, but he came back full of wonder and excitement at