On Saturday Queen’s death brings memories of Mum

WHATEVER our thoughts on royalty, most of us will have been affected by the atmosphere of solemn reflection which has overtaken the nation since the Queen’s death.

Given the popularity of a monarch who served so well for so many years, few will be surprised by the extent of the sadness, but many will also have been moved by the way in which her passing somehow opened doors revealing elements of their own personal loss and grief.

Quite a few media reports have suggested that the passing of Her Majesty has inspired many to ponder losses among their own family or friends – especially those losses which occurred during the Covid lockdowns when the act of saying goodbye was drastically and necessarily reduced by circumstance.

Indeed, the Queen herself experienced such a loss and few of us will ever forget the image of her sitting alone, with great dignity, at the funeral of her beloved husband. Countless thousands of us shared the silent grimness of those heralded and uncelebrated farewells. I have, in this column, mentioned the lacklustre and forlorn way in which my family was required to say goodbye to our dear mum.

Those tiny small-scale funerals during the epidemic were the exact antithesis of the mighty and allembracing farewell scenes we have been witnessing over the past week. Nine people attended Charmian Hesp’s final goodbye and the whole thing was done and dusted in 20 minutes. I made a stumbling and somewhat inept speech, and that was it – mum’s coffin went off to Taunton crematorium, probably in the back of a funeral director’s van, while we be-masked brothers visited her favourite viewpoint in the hills to shed tears over flasks of tea and coffee.

Somehow, watching the amazing and moving scenes of national grief on television this week made me feel guilty about the scant and inadequate way in which we said goodbye to mum, even though we had so little choice in the matter. And I write about it here because I reckon similar emotions will have been felt by countless others who experienced minimalist farewells over the past couple of years.

Of course it is right and proper that the death of a national leader should be marked with pomp and ceremony – just as it’s natural that the passing of a humble and self-effacing citizen should be celebrated accordingly with very little fuss. It’s what my mum would have wanted on both counts. She was a huge admirer of the Queen and would have respected and applauded every moment of the ongoing wall-to-wall coverage. At the same time she was almost extreme in her “don’t go to any trouble on my behalf” desires.

Be that as it may, I, like many others, have found that the national state of mourning has encouraged me once again to think deeply about my own mother’s passing. I was given the opportunity to do exactly that when her brother, William, invited me and my brothers to join him on a tour of the West Country village where they were born and raised. He now lives outside the region, so it’s not a thing that can happen often. We brothers jumped at the chance to wallow for a few hours in our mother’s distant past.

As I drove into the lovely West Somerset community of Stogumber so I was able to reflect, not for the first time, how it is that big universal events can sometimes dovetail with situations in our own private lives. Because, to me as an Englishman, Stogumber is a place that epitomises so much that the Queen represented – at the same time it is somehow the quintessential essence of all my mother stood for. I have never had to fight for my country like those brave souls who are defending the Ukraine at present, but if I was taking up a cudgel for Britain then I can imagine marching forth with a mental image of Stogumber at the forefront of my mind. It would act as a kind of icon to remind me exactly what I was fighting for.

The pretty red-sandstone village sitting in hillock-and-dell country halfway between the Brendon and Quantock hills is the nearest nonfiction landscape to Tolkien’s Shire where Hobbits lived peacefully for centuries. The last time any largescale raping or pillaging was done around Stogumber was when the Vikings plundered the nearby Somerset coast 1,200 years ago.

When I see images of the Queen’s coffin lying in state and close my eyes to imagine what it was that she really represented, I see that quintessential British landscape with Stogumber and its lovely church, outlying farms, huddled cottages, village pub, cricket pitch, and all the other things which make an English community so unique and special. Including human ingredients such as the quietly spoken decency and honesty which ruled such places for a thousand years.

Then I see my mum who was, until 18 months ago, the living embodiment of that world. And I see our late Queen who was, somehow, the living symbol of it for so many decades. It has been good to both mourn and to celebrate such things.

When I see images of the Queen’s coffin... I see a quintessential British landscape