On Saturday The shock and the tears as the news broke

Read Martin’s column every week in the Western Morning News

ALL at once the garden was filled with a piercing scream and, just for a moment, we were glad to be high up in the boughs of a large apple tree. I can still feel both the alarm and the sylvan sense of security now – even though it is just a dusty memory stretching back almost 60 years.

It was my mum who was doing the screaming on November 22, 1963 and a second later she was shouting the following news up to where we were building a tree-den in the apple boughs… “President Kennedy has been shot!”

Aged seven, I don’t suppose I had much idea who President Kennedy was – so I imagine the longevity of this nailed-on, cast-iron, memory probably has more to do with the fact I had never heard my mother scream like that before.

She was at it again a few years later, by the way. But in much happier circumstances. They were screams of delight as she bounced around hugging her football-mad father having watched England win the World Cup. I remember that as if it were yesterday too…

Obviously, I won’t be around in another 60 years to recall the moment when the Queen’s death was announced on BBC Radio at 18.30 on Thursday evening. Of course, I didn’t scream as my old mum was wont to do, but - like most people who heard the news on radio or saw it on TV – I will remember those moments for as long as I live.

I was listening to the radio lying on a cream coloured sofa, alone in a cream coloured room, with a violent downpour drumming loud on the roof when the ever-professional Mishal Husain read the announcement. And, like millions of others will have done, I felt that strange butterfly sensation hit my stomach, accompanied by the sting of warm salty fluid flowing through the old tear-ducts.

If someone had told the 21-yearold me – the one who was a dropout living in a sea-cave in a remote part of Greece – that he would one day cry upon hearing news of the Queen’s death, he’d have thought they were mad. I’d have asked: why should it bother me that an elderly lady, who has nothing to do with me or my family, has gone to meet her maker?

Where the hippy-ish Hesp would have been wrong is that the Queen very much did have something to do with him, and everyone else in the UK as well as many other places besides.

As I write, almost 24 hours after her passing, I see from social-media feeds that half the world is talking about nothing else. Blimey, I’ve just read Emmanuel Macron’s speech in which he says… “To you, she was your Queen. To us, she was The Queen. She will be with all of us forever.”

For the French president to be declaring such a thing… Well, what can one say? Elizabeth II was a phenomenon. You have to wonder if we will ever see the likes of her again.

She was arguably the nearest thing the human race will ever have to a living, breathing omni-present being. As someone on the radio observed – because of her long years on the throne, no other person in history has ever been so photographed, filmed, followed and generally written about, and probably never will.

Even if you were a rabid anti-royalist, you carried her image around in your pocket in the form of coins or banknotes. You’d have seen her on television or in newspapers on an almost daily basis. Just by being her, she was everywhere. The Queen was in our lives – an integral part of our existence – whether we liked it or not.

And I did like it because, as a roving feature writer covering royal visits, I was fortunate enough to witness the magic of it at first hand. It was only when you saw her in action in front of vast pressing crowds that you realised just how very brilliant and adept she was at her unique and exacting job.

I believe our new king will be good at it too. Unlike almost anyone else on the planet he has, after all, had plenty of practice.

At which point republicans might protest. Do we need a king? Isn’t now the time for a change? To which I’d reply with the same line I repeated again and again during the Brexit vote…

If it ain’t broke, why fix it?

For a start, I believe the royal institution earns this country far more than it costs. Ask any business person and they will tell you that all successful commercial concerns need a Unique Selling Proposition. As a nation, we already have a readymade USP that probably enjoys the best known branding on the planet.

Secondly, what’s the alternative? Nations seem to need figureheads or leading families, no matter how weird or bizarre some of them can be. America has the Kardashians… Enough said, I think.

But let’s forget all that while the nation is in mourning. Let us remember how very fortunate we have been to have had such a person representing us for more than 70 long, mainly peaceful and prosperous, years. God rest her soul.

‘The hippy-ish Hesp was wrong. The Queen did have something to do with him’ – and with everyone else’