The Queue
Originally written for ‘Kehilla’, the magazine of Hadley Wood Jewish Community, Rosh Hashanah 5783 edition
“I have a Strategy”, I told anyone who would listen, about the fact that my mother wanted to queue for what was looking like eight hours to see the Queen lying in state. It should be said, I’m a fan of a strategy. I’ve never gone wrong with a strategy. And I didn’t intend to this time. Don’t get me wrong, I was keen to see the lying in state. I’d have probably even agreed to a four-hour queue. But eight hours? Longer than a flight to New York? Forget it.
So, the strategy went something like this. I’d take her to join the back of The Queue, which was in Bermondsey by then. We’d wait until we were issued our wristbands. At that point, she’d have her souvenir, she’d have felt a part of something, her dodgy hip would be even dodgier than usual, and we’d pop off for a nice dinner and head home. So confident of my strategy was I that I even parked my car in the Underground car park, feeling absolutely certain we’d be home well before the last train.
It turns out strategies aren’t much of a match for the indefatigability of a 70 year old, born just months after Queen Elizabeth acceded to the throne in 1952, and a lifelong royalist, queue-observer (“It’s not that British people like queues, we just respect them”, she tells anyone who’ll listen in The Queue), and stoic.
And so, about two hours into The Queue, as I turn to her and say, “So we’re actually doing this, then?”, it strikes me that perhaps I had not been the only one with a Strategy that Thursday evening.
That I had, in fact, been out-strategied by my mother. Who, as we meander along the well-marked route, is proving some sort of point by refusing to sit down even when the opportunity presents itself.
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Because as we stand in that queue, surrounded by new friends who we’ve met somewhere between Bermondsey and Tower Bridge, a strange sort of magic comes over our human chain. Somehow, the hours pass remarkably quickly, as we shuffle along the South Bank, London’s history coming out to greet our parade. We pass through Dickensian back streets of Southwark, in front of theatres old and new, the Thames as our constant companion, ticking off each bridge as we pass by it. My mother still refuses to sit down.
By the time we reach the infamous zig-zags in the gardens at Westminster, our Dunkirk Spirit is wearing pretty thin. Twitter warns that it’s still another THREE hours once you cross Lambeth Bridge and enter Victoria Tower Gardens. It seems impossible to believe; it’s just a few harmless looking Disney-style columns. Can’t possibly be three hours, can it? We start counting down the rows. Cheery stewards tell us, “Not long now” in a tone that makes it clear that we should prepare for the worst. My mother refuses to sit down. I unashamedly take to the floor at every possible lull, legs folded school-assembly-style, surrounded by other women my age, our mothers watching us from above.
We’ve almost forgotten that there is an objective at the end of The Queue. The Queue has become an activity in itself, our little community, a destination.
Finally, just after 2am, eight hours after we joined The Queue, we enter Westminster Hall. Eight hours of queueing, for one exquisite minute of remembrance and gratitude. The air in Westminster Hall that night is something I’ll remember for the rest of my life. The absolute still. The collective emotion. The ineffable shimmer in every breath we took.
I leave the Hall transformed by the experience. By the sense of playing my own tiny part in the making of history. And by the essence of The Queue which, for my over-privileged generation — who, as a cohort and to generalise, have never seen service, never known real hardship — was the closest thing to wartime spirit that I’ll know.
In today’s Times, Caitlin Moran writes that, “every single person, all 400,000 of them, as they paused in front of the coffin, was like a tiny, three-second play. A single stitch in the Bayeux Tapestry of mourning.” My mother messages me this morning, “We were two of those stitches”. And we were.
Turns out her strategy won the day after all.
