Coronation Read Free Page B

to London for the Coronation of the Queen.
    ‘Well, what do you say?’ Clagg had queried them. ‘It’s one or t’other. We’ll put it to a vote. All in favour of going to the Coronation say “Aye”!’
    The treble voices of Johnny and Gwendoline fairly screamed out their ‘Ayes’. Violet’s voice was heard too.
    ‘All those against?’
    ‘It’s a squandering of money I call it,’ said Granny. ‘The children need the sunshine and the sea air.’ It was not so much that she didn’t want to go as that she found it constitutionally impossible to agree with anything that any of the others wanted.
    Will Clagg, who was usually infuriated by Granny’s intransigence, now did something unusual for him. He went over and chucked the old lady under the chin. ‘Come on, Granny,’ he said, ‘you were around when the last Queen was buried, weren’t you? Don’t you want to see the new one crowned? I’m voting “Aye”.’
    Granny Bonner found herself so powerfully and astonishingly moved that she had to blink her eyes lest the others see. It was true, she was the living link between two Queens of England. ‘Well,’ she equivocated, ‘I suppose it mightn’t hurt for one summer if we stay at home.’
    ‘That makes it unanimous,’ Will Clagg had said. The children had begun to scream and clap their hands and jump about.
    *
    All day long the registered letter from London, sender Albert Capes, 3 Clacton Road, S.W.14. had been sitting upon the mantelpiece intriguing and tantalising Violet, and Granny as well, though she wouldn’t have admitted it. It had arrived, of course, after Clagg had departed for the mill and the children to school and there was no doubt that it contained the tickets for the Coronation, for the week before Clagg had posted off the money order to his cousin with instructions to purchase them. There they were then surely, in the brown manila cover, thick, bulky, heavier than any letter they had ever received before. There, in that pregnant envelope, reposed the equivalent of those fourteen blissful days at the Shore View Hotel, just outside Morecambe proper.
    It was, of course, unthinkable that Vi would open an envelope addressed to her husband, but she found it difficult not to break the seal. For she wanted something to hold, to see and feel, something material which might perhaps begin to alleviate the pangs of the lost holiday. The lure and the excitement of the Coronation were undiminished, but it was as yet too abstract for her to grasp. Those lazy, restful days at the summer hotel, where she didn’t have to appear in the dining-room for a cooked breakfast until half past eight if she didn’t wish to, were something tangible and experienced. The same holiday spent at home in Little Pudney would be just like every other week except that Will would be there cluttering up the house, making Granny even more irritable, while the children would be about with nothing to do.
    Granny, too, had been having second thoughts on the validity of giving up all of the pleasant features lumped under the one heading of ‘change of air’ for one day of excitement which probably included being trampled underfoot or getting lost. Each time she passed the envelope on the mantelpiece she would mutter something to herself which Violet could not quite catch, but by the tone of her voice and her mother’s more than usually sour expression she knew that it was disapproving. It seemed as though the day would never draw to a close.
    Yet at last evening had come, bringing the accustomed heavy footfalls on the pavement approaching the house.
    Granny said, ‘Late, isn’t he?’
    Violet glanced at the clock. ‘He’ll have stopped for one at the George and Dragon.’ The children at their homework heard him and came rushing into the front room, shouting, ‘It’s Dad! Will he open it? Can we see them now?’ And then as he made his entrance, ‘Dad, they’ve come, they’ve come! Open it!’
    This Will Clagg had