A Right Royal Occasion

I imagine that my mother, wherever she is, will be very pleased. In the last year or so of her life, in the grip of dementia, she and Prince Philip became great friends. It started with a phone call from an aide at Buckingham Palace - he asked how she was and after an exchange of pleasantries he said the Queen would like to speak to her and would that be alright. My mother said ‘yes, that’d be fine, put her on’. The aide passed the phone to the Queen, she and my mother had a chat, and the Queen promised to keep in touch.

The Queen proved to be a bit flaky in that regard but Prince Philip, the Duke Of Edinburgh, was, in my mother’s words, an absolute brick - he called her regularly and they had great chats.
‘He’s not at all like you’d imagine’ she explained, ‘he calls me love…’

I never met the Duke of Edinburgh myself, but he did once visit my school. I think he was coming to present a Duke Of Edinburgh Award or some such nonsense. I was sixteen at the time and full of a newly discovered and seething hatred for the establishment.

The Duke would be arriving by helicoptor and touching down on the rugby pitch. It was May and the weather had been intermittently sunny and wet so the grass on the rugby pitch was thick and luxurient. The groundsman, a simple and justifiably belligerant man who we called Happy Harry, was detailed off to mow the grass and paint a large H in a circle in the middle of of the pitch so the helicoptor pilot would know where to land.

There was huge excitement amongst the staff at the newly formed Priory Comprehensive School. The school was an amalgamation of the County Grammar School for Boys, the County Grammar School for Girls, and the Secondary Modern School, where the girls and boys who were not considered bright enough to merit an academic education had enjoyed being girls and boys together, along with woodwork classes, cookery classes, and plenty of evenings with no homework in which to watch Top Of The Pops.

The grammar school residue among the staff were particularly excited - they’d always tried to run things on the lines of a public school (as in Eton or Harrow), so a visit from a major league royal was something of a feather in the cap. The headmaster, the deputy head, heads of departments and the entire teaching staff along with a host of local dignitaries, the Lord and Lady Mayor, the local member of Parliament (the Right Honorable Tufton Beamish, Conservative) lined up along the edge of the rugby ready to greet the Prince as he walked from the helicoptor.

The helicoptor circled around high in the sky, positioned itself over the rugby field and swooped into its final descent. It landed fair and square on the temporary H in the circle. The rotor blades whipped up the wet grass clippings and sent them splattering into the faces of all and sundry.

It was one of the best days of my entire school life.