Ready for eyes of world

Opinion

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This article was published 17/09/2022 (829 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

LONDON — When Liz Marks was just four years old, her mother took her to see Queen Elizabeth’s coronation. It was the first in what would become a string of memories Marks carries of the Royal Family, as their life milestones intertwined with her own, but she doesn’t remember much from the day the young Queen was crowned.

What she does remember: being nervous. The feel of her mother’s hand, clutching hers. And the crowds, she remembers the crowds above all, that massive sea of people thronging the London Underground subway station as she and her mother tried to make their way home, all the time wondering: “Where will we go? Where will we go?”

Sixty-nine years later, Marks found herself back in the heart of London, back in the midst of a crowd so vast it surges like the ocean, back asking where she could go. She’d flown in from where she lives now, in San Francisco, just days before; on Sunday, with her jet lag subsiding, she and her sister, Jessica Andersson, struck out towards Buckingham Palace.

What they hoped to do was scope out where they could stake out a place this morning to catch a glimpse of the funeral procession. What they found instead was a staggering flow of people spilling through the streets around the palace, making an endless march to nowhere in particular, because anywhere in particular was impossible to go.

Somehow, it doesn’t feel chaotic. The mood is pleasant, the great masses of people largely calm.

“I am unbelievably impressed by the organization,” Marks says, as she watches a river of humanity flow up the street from Buckingham Palace and toward Hyde Park. “Of course we know that the Brits, nobody does pomp and ceremony like this.”

It’s Sunday afternoon, less than 24 hours before the funeral. London is fully dressed, ready for the eyes of the world.

It has been preparing for this moment for years, knowing that monarchs, even this one, don’t last forever; knowing that when the sun finally set on the 70-year reign of Queen Elizabeth II, history would expect a once-in-a-generation sort of show.

At Hyde Park, tall video screens stand ready for the viewing. Sanitation trucks crawl over the grass, getting banks of urinals and porta-potties ready. There are medical tents. Water stations. Everything in its place, everything ready, the pace of work determined but unharried. And all around this work, the people just keep coming.

To accommodate them, everything is fluid. The places folks can get to keep shifting. One worker tells me the instructions they get from higher-ups change by the hour. Streets that were open to pedestrian traffic are suddenly blocked off; sidewalks are suddenly made one-way only; and the most familiar sound is that of a police officer’s voice, ushering people along.

“Keep walking, everyone,” the officers and security guards call out, at near every corner. “Everyone, keep walking.”

I find Marks and Andersson at the western end of Constitution Hill, the broad tree-lined street that runs past Buckingham Palace’s north flank and up to the Wellington Arch, where the queen’s casket will be carried away after the funeral. They’re asking a police officer about how to get to parts of the procession route. I’m curious too, so I sidle up to listen.

They ask about how to get to certain spots, but the officer shakes his head. It’s all closed off, now, he says.

“At some point during the next 24 hours, things will start to change,” he says. “But at the moment, the amount of people…”

He trails off. Right now, he explains, the entire operation is just trying to keep people moving. They’d expected an enormous number of visitors, but that figure, he says, has already been exceeded. Marks and Andersson nod and turn away, thinking to where they should go next, and what they can do to fix their plan for how best to attend the funeral.

This is not the first royal rodeo, for these sisters. Their lives have woven into the Royal Family’s big events before.

“They’ve been such an integral part of my life from birth,” Andersson says. “The queen has been around from the day I was born. And maybe it’s the pedestal because they’re not involved in politics, or they’re not supposed to be. It’s almost a feeling of comfort in the royal family. It creates a stability, and you just feel like they’ve always been there.”

For Marks, her first brush with royal pageantry was the queen’s coronation. But for years after that, she wasn’t particularly invested: “It was just like ‘oh yeah, the Royals,’” she says, and gestures as if waving off the idea with her hand. Then came Diana, and everything changed.

Marks adored Diana. It was the Princess of Wales that first made her feel connected to the Royal Family, so when Diana died in 1997, the sisters were devastated. At the time, Andersson was living in Paris; every day, she commuted through the tunnel where the fatal crash happened. Marks was, by then, living in the United States, and the distance still haunts her.

“I was in America for the funeral, and it was horrendous, being there,” she says, and her eyes well up with tears.

So she watched the funeral from afar, and she saw how 12-year-old Prince Harry followed his mother’s casket as the world watched. Her heart broke for him, because she knew what that loss meant: she had been just 12 years old when her mother died, too. Decades later, when Harry anounced his engagement, Marks vowed she’d be there to see his joy, too.

In 2018, when he wed Meghan Markle at Windsor Castle, she was right along the viewing route with her sister.

“We got up at 3 a.m., sat on the long walk, had a hot chocolate, a bacon butty,” she says, smiling at the memory. “Of course, the crowds were nothing like this. But that was such a joyous event. That camaraderie, the feeling of being with people and the joy of it, was just amazing. That’s what you want to be part of, that celebration.”

Now the sisters are reunited again, on the brink of a more sombre royal occasion. When news of the queen’s death spread, Marks knew she had to be there for the funeral. But since arriving back in her hometown she’s had “mixed feelings” about what she’s seen of the crowds filling up London, she says.

The day before, she’d gone to see where people were laying floral tributes at Green Park. She watched as some visitors took smiling selfies next to the vast pools of flowers, and the cards on which people had written tender and often deeply personal reflections. Something about that juxtaposition of touristic photographs and condolences left her unsettled.

“It is a very well done spectacle, but that’s not what it’s about,” she says. “It’s not Ripley’s Believe It or Not. It’s something really serious for Brits, or for people who really feel it in their bones. So I got this sense, and I can’t quite put it into words, that I was being dragged along with the hype and the spectacle of it all. Something about it touched a bit of a nerve.”

At the same time, she adds, it’s “absolutely fantastic the amount of people that want to pay their respects.” And then there’s this: the Royal Family courts that relationship. They create the spectacle. That mass public curiosity about their lives — and their deaths — is the well from which their continued existence springs. If it were to run dry, so would their role.

So maybe, I muse, this is what’s unsettling her: for those people who, like her, do feel a connection to the Royal Family, that relationship is often deeply personal. It’s the milestones of their lives marked in time with the royals; it’s the seeing, in a 12-year-old boy’s televised grief, a loss they so intimately knew. Those links have meaning, to those who hold them.

But where is the space to express that private sort of grief, in the world’s most public event? Can it be done?

Marks nods. Maybe the answer to that, she says, is just not to join the big public event; but even there, you’re torn. She and her sister thought about gathering with their family and watching the funeral at home, but at the same time they do feel the need to be out here, amongst all these people. United, in a way that may not happen again in a lifetime.

“You have that sense you want to come be part of the collective, the emotional strength of the collective,” she says.

I thank the sisters for their time; it’s given me a window onto the nuances of what is playing out, en masse, on these streets. After I leave the sisters, I inch my way towards Westminster Abbey, slipping into tube stations to bypass where some roads are closed to pedestrians, finding a patch of empty pavement across from the church to watch the masses stream by.

“Keep walking, everyone,” a security guard calls out, again. “Keep walking.”

Suddenly, I realize: for the people circling these long walks about London in the days before the big event, this is not just a funeral, nor a spectacle. It is both of those things, but it is also a pilgrimage, a journey in search of something that can only be found in the doing it, in the being present on the threshold of history, even if only shuffling by it for a minute.

What they will find, time will tell. But maybe, decades hence, a journalist will ask, and they’ll give their answer.

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca