My father, not wholly a fiction man, loved Simon’s Alms for Oblivion sequence of novels; I think their classical heartlessness confirmed something for him, and he enjoyed the long tease on his boyhood bugbear William Rees-Mogg. Always, for a clever and subtle man, surprisingly willing to embrace prejudice were it against a Tory, my father was nonetheless open-hearted always about the boy, and the man, James Prior, another contemporary at Charterhouse.

Then: ‘Why do you like the Queen, Mummy?’, my undergraduate daughter, who, as it happens has had far more actual contact with the royal family than I have, asked in the car on the way to the eightieth-birthday gathering of the man who is not my father, but whom I address, as do his six blood children and their children, and my children, as ‘Papa’. And then I knew I had to write this book to tell her.

I like the Queen because she isn’t dead. I like her because she defers, as far as one can see, most gratification. I like her because she was there and is here, because she puts duty before sensation, because my father carried me to see her on Princes Street when she was a new Queen, because going to the cinema is connected with her dreary but durable anthem, because she is happy in Scotland, because she is the Duke of Lancaster and a woman, because she has found a way of looking and looks it, has found a way of being and is it, because she is absolutely not stupid but not intellectual, because she is not me, not even the best of me, but she is my times, and shelters my life. In the car I tried to say this.

‘I like the Queen because I loved my parents,’ I said, trying again. It stuck like a granny-knot, instead of flying like the standard I had intended.

‘But Grandpa was a republican.’

He was a contrarian, of course, a formalist and an anarchist, a patrician flincher away from all unfairness, a detester of privilege who knew great houses more intimately than some of their owners. He had that eye, yet was not, unlike me (until this closing of my eyes), a voyeur.

Now though, I am more a voyeur of what is coming back to me out of the past than of what offers itself to my closing eyes. They are becoming like lychees, jelly with a stone and a thin rind lid. And over it all still reigns the reigning Queen.

‘Like’ is too passionless a word for what I feel for her. The Queen is an emblem and carrier of memory, as rock music for my daughter perhaps.

Then again, as bores say, just as one thinks one can make a bolt — that word! — for it, then again, the Queen is like my own mother in one single way. She is safest, we imagine, among creatures. Where the Queen has her mystery and her awesome power of patronage, pure in itself but corrupting for the corrupt, to defend, my mother had her horribly vulnerable person; my mother was eaten up by other people wanting a bit of her. She was made of sex appeal, sweetness and unconfidence.

Two things I have said, in attempt at self-definition, for years. I’ve not believed them as I said them, but I was impersonating the solid sort of person who might be heard to say such things.

One is, ‘I don’t trust the sort of woman who prefers the company of animals to the company of humans.’

The other (which I haven’t said for about twenty-two years, prevented by some prefiguring shadow maybe) is, ‘I cannot stand a woman drunk.’

The first is Mummy.

The second, who might as well have modified her statement’s punctuation to, ‘I cannot stand, a woman drunk’, is, of course, me.

LENS I: Chapter 5

The sort of unpopularity that I enjoyed during my first period of schooling was regrettable mainly for the sort of popularity it set up later. I was unpopular because I was odd and then popular for the same reason. This made an unsound base for the dreadful glamour that visited later, attendant upon my mother’s death and the passive allure of my widowed father.

Today, when I am writing this, is a Monday. Monday is washing day; I do the big wash on Monday, which is right. I know this because

They that wash on Monday

Have all week to dry,

They that wash on Tuesday

Are not so much awry,

They that wash on Wednesday

Are not so much to blame,

They that wash on Thursday

Wash for shame,

They that wash on Friday

Wash in need,

But they that wash on Saturday,

Oh! They’re sluts indeed.

My godfather Francis Gordon of Cairness gave me for my first birthday, 1 July 1956, the book from which this jingle comes, an airily laid out nursery rhyme collection called Lavender’s Blue, compiled by Kathleen Lines and pictured by (these are the terms used) Harold Jones. I enjoyed that crossed wire of nomenclature, as soon as I could read the poems for myself, that it was actually Harold Jones who did the lines. His is a line-led relaxed style, not fussy but full of detail and shading. He makes the human figure architectural, though not massive, as in a frieze, and architectural detail, such as that of London Bridge as it falls down, dances along the page. The rhymes, proverbs and nostrums are placed handsomely within each page. Print and its layout drew me very soon; I loved lettering, but I remember being churlishly resistant to my godfather’s encouragements to learn calligraphy, the exercise sheets, the nibs, the black Indian ink that shone coppery if you spilled it on anything hard and non-absorbent. I had an ugly hand till I was about eleven, and after that a self-forced Italic that was over-decorative and built, thanks to that early shirking, on an insufficiently Roman armature.

Fram writes a good Italic hand. His was inherited from Wilfrid Blunt, brother of Anthony, who had taught that hand to many generations of boys at his school. I taught myself mine in order to have an accomplishment with which to win book tokens. I used regularly to win a handwriting prize sponsored by Brooke Bond tea.

Much of my childhood was to do with line and the materials used for making, drawing, following, understanding lines — pens, pencils, crayons, T-squares, protractors, chisels. My parents drew lines but hardly ever drew the line, save in matters of moral taste. After one outing with another family, I used an expression to which my father objected. If I think of it now I taste earth in my mouth. It was ‘little Jew’. I copied it from a father who was describing another father. My own daddy took me out of our house and walked me through the old streets. He sat me down with a book, with those photographs, the heaps of legs and deep-shadowed eyes, the shoes, the spectacles. I do not know where the book was kept in our house as I had found every other book that might be mined for prurience or horror by the time I was eight. I felt none of the sense that this was a world to come, that I felt when I poked about in Gray’s Anatomy or Fanny Hill.

I felt that this was it. This was the world from which the destroyed worlds of my night-time fears had come, that people could do this to other people. It was not a nightmare; it was the truth. It was not a private horror but a filthy fact. The next time we visited friends, the man of whom had been in Auschwitz, he got me to look at the number on his arm and to sit and listen. He gave me a maths tutorial immediately after the talk of how it had been in the camp, which no doubt he watered down. Never had mathematics been so welcome, so consolatory. I counted the white hairs in his beard with delight as though they were shoots coming through. Time looked valuable suddenly.

My father had that certainty, that racial or religious discrimination of any sort was evil. He had been raised in a household where everyone, including the servants, attended — Anglican — family prayers every morning. He hated that and was mortified though seldom mentioned it since the source of the piety was his mother and he was never in my hearing disrespectful of her, very likely never was so in his life. He was a choral scholar at the Pilgrims’ School, which supplies the choir for Winchester Cathedral, as were his brothers, Ormiston and Clement. Clement went on to become the organist at St George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle, then at Winchester Cathedral. My father loved the liturgy all his life, attended church, and sang, but I’m not sure what he believed. He loathed the Pilgrims’ School and its School Hymn, into which he would insert the word ‘not’, as in