Queen Elizabeth II: the woman who waited for no one

I might have kept this contrary, quasi-blasphemous thought to myself (just in case I was the only person in Christendom entertaining it) but Sam Knight, a fine writer for The New Yorker, dared to hint at it in his limpid piece, In The Queue To Say Goodbye To The Queen.

Queueing himself to pass Her Majesty's casket (we now know he was one of estimated 250,000 who did that, and if in England your columnist would have too, albeit not being quite sure why), an affable Knight noticed that everyone, everywhere had always had to wait for the living Queen.

Now, even in her death here we (the patient queuers) are, still waiting upon her, Knight reflected.

"The use of the phrase 'to wait' upon a sovereign - to attend to their needs, to be a lady-in-waiting - dates from the 14th century," Knight reflects.

"The [late] Queen was waited on, and waited for, every moment of her life. The waiting is what separated her, and what joined more or less everybody else. We were unified in our exclusion. It is unclear how well the Queen understood this. Perhaps she understood enough not to try to understand. Her real love was horses."

What a lot of waiting for her Australian commoners, unified in our exclusion, did during her 16 visits to Australia.

What feats of patience were displayed, including some feats of queueing, truly phenomenal in Australians who, unlike the British, have no talent, no evolved aptitude for queueing. We are a milling, thronging people, but somehow, making an un-Australian exception for our Queen, achieved PBs of orderly decorum and endurance.

Reporters of royal tours (I was occasionally one of them) always used to ask those waiting for a glimpse of the Queen how long they had been waiting because these freakish feats of patience were such newsworthy testaments to royalty's magic power to make ordinary people behave so extraordinarily.

She is said to have quipped in explanation of the massive crowds of commoners she drew everywhere that "I have to be seen to be believed".

And yet, given that she didn't know what waiting was, and that perhaps she always felt more affection for horses than for people (but perhaps she had some rare affection for those diminutive loyal subjects, her horses' jockeys) she may never have had the foggiest appreciation of the sacrifices made by those who had come to see her.

Whether or not she ever even liked commoners like me, I developed deep, confused and conflicting feelings for her. Not even thoroughbred racehorses (of which she owned and stabled obscene hundreds, and this in a kingdom stalked by poverty and homelessness) would have dragged me away from a moment of the televised funeral or from the strangely mesmerising funeral procession that followed it.

Strangely, somehow the two-minute silence towards the end of the funeral service in Westminster Abbey seemed a kind of highlight (not the right word, but our language doesn't have words for these occasions) of the whole melancholy extravaganza.

It was an excellent and profound silence. It contributed so much to what someone has called the "useless beauty" of these rare, royalty-occasioned occasions that the British stage so beautifully.

I wondered if the silence took some of its freakish power from the ways in which the service's great hymns (all of which I knew and was able to join in singing, sending my pesky atheism to its room for the evening) had been so very loud.

They were in part noisily thundered by the organ and congregation and piercingly accompanied by stained-glass-window-rattling trumpets.

The sacred cacophony of the funeral was somewhere still there echoing in the Abbey (and in our living rooms and in our heads) when it was time for noble Silence with a capital S to send it, the cacophony, packing.

To the extent that the funeral had hitherto been a pomp and ceremony entertainment, too grandly gripping for us to be able to hear ourselves think, the two-minute silence sobered us all up. It gave us essential time with our inner lives at a time when there is so much for thinking people of the Commonwealth, of the whole world, to think about.

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