THE TOWER OF LONDON. With Willy and Kate. August 2014.
The reason for our visit was an art installation. Across the dry moat were spread tens of thousands of bright red ceramic poppies. Ultimately, the plan was for 888,246 of these poppies to be spread there, one for each Commonwealth soldier who’d died in the Great War. The hundredth anniversary of the war’s start was being marked all over Europe.
Apart from its extraordinary beauty, the art installation was a different way of visualizing war’s carnage—indeed, of visualizing death itself. I felt stricken. All those lives. All those families.
It didn’t help that this visit to the Tower was also three weeks before the anniversary of Mummy’s death, or that I always connected her to the Great War, because her birthday, July 1, the start of the Battle of the Somme, was the war’s bloodiest day, the bloodiest day in the history of the British Army.
In Flanders fields the poppies blow…
All these things were converging in my heart and mind outside the Tower as someone stepped forward, handed me a poppy and told me to place it. (The artists behind the installation wanted every poppy to be placed by a living person; thousands of volunteers had pitched in thus far.) Willy and Kate were also handed poppies and told to place them on any spot of their choosing.
After we’d finished, all three of us stood back, lost in our private thoughts.
I believe it was just then that the constable of the Tower appeared, greeted us, told us about the poppy, how it had come to be the British symbol of war. It was the only thing that bloomed on those blood-soaked battlefields, said the constable, who was none other than…General Dannatt.
The man who’d sent me back to war. Truly, everything was converging.
He asked if we’d like a quick tour of the Tower. Course, we said.
We walked up and down the Tower’s steep stairs, peered into its dark corners, and soon found ourselves before a case of thick glass.
Inside were dazzling jewels, including…the Crown. Holy shit. The Crown.
The one that had been placed upon Granny’s head at her 1953 coronation.
For a moment I thought it was also the same crown that sat on Gan-Gan’s coffin as it went through the streets. It looked the same, but someone pointed out several key differences.
Ah, yes. So this was Granny’s crown, and hers alone, and now I remembered her telling me how unbelievably heavy it had been the first time they set it upon her head.
It looked heavy. It also looked magical. The more we stared, the brighter it got—was that possible? And the glow was seemingly internal. The jewels did their part, but the crown seemed to possess some inner energy source, something beyond the sum of its parts, its jeweled band, its golden fleurs-de-lis, its crisscrossing arches and gleaming cross. And of course its ermine base. You couldn’t help but feel that a ghost, encountered late at night inside the Tower, might have a similar glow. I moved my eyes slowly, appreciatively, from the bottom to the top. The crown was a wonder, a transcendent and evocative piece of art, not unlike the poppies, but all I could think in that moment was how tragic that it should remain locked up in this Tower.
Yet another prisoner.
Seems a waste, I said to Willy and Kate, to which, I recall, they said nothing.
Maybe they were looking at that band of ermine, remembering my wedding remarks.
Maybe not.
