We landed at Newark Liberty Airport on Monday, after a nine-hour flight from Nice, precisely at the advertised time of 4.30pm, there to be picked up by our friend and former USPS letter-carrier, Mike Downes. When a few months ago he retired from the postal service and quit delivering mail, it left him more time for his avocation of operating a boutique limousine service delivering people, mainly to and from airports.
There is always comfort in returning to home base, though our minds remain full of the sights, sounds, fragrances, and tastes of Provence. Some famous historian or another famously said that the most important event in eighteenth-century England happened in France. The reference, of course, was to the French Revolution. So I suppose it is not extraordinary that the most important event of our French vacation happened in England: the death of the Queen on September 8, four days before our return. Of course, the death of a personage of such importance would have claimed international attention under any circumstances. The political and cultural significance of the Queen’s reign has been endlessly discussed by experts in the press. What has captured my own attention is the operation of social memory. Few world leaders have been on the scene for seven decades, and few have been the objects of the evident admiration and respect of so many for so long. But our group gathered together for the house party in Salernes—eight of us briefly, and six of us for most of the time—perhaps had its special reasons. With the exception of myself, everyone there was a native-born Briton who had come of age in the early years of the Queen’s reign. Five of us had been students together at Oxford in the late 1950s. My one and only “meeting” with the Queen and Prince Phillip took place there, when I was rounded up by some desperate college administrator trying to put together a panchromatic group of foreign students for royal review. The Duke of Edinburgh made a quip about the insufficiencies of British central heating.
Rarely enough are we self-consciously aware that we are experiencing something “historic”, but the death of magnates is an occasion when many do. In earlier centuries people believed that the very heavens proclaimed the birth and death of great princes, as well as their great deeds, in meteor showers and comets. What we now know as Halley’s Comet smiled on the Norman Conquest of Britain, and is recorded in the Bayeux Tapestry. As we sat around the table hearing the news, somebody said, “I will remember where and when I was when I first heard this news--forever.” This was an almost theatrically solemn remark and solemnly delivered. But it was a sentiment we all understood, and one frequently commented upon in the press, as it seems to be commonly shared. Liz Truss, who had been invited by the Queen two days before she died to form a government, had been the subject of much conversation—not all of it complimentary—in earlier days. The whole period of our stay was a kind of running feast and symposium—wonderful conversation, much of it over wonderful meals. We all have vivid memories of the circumstances in which we learned of certain private events. But there is a very limited number of public events that command an almost universal racial memory. The analogy frequently drawn in my age group was with the death of President John Kennedy by an assassin’s bullet on November 22, 1963. If you were alive and sentient then, you almost certainly remember, and vividly, the circumstances of where and when you heard of it. The more recent event seared forever into our memory, and especially the memory of younger people, is learning the news of the Twin Towers attack on September 11, 2001.
I heard of Kennedy’s assassination as I was walking up a hill between classes on the campus of the University of Wisconsin campus in Madison. I was in my first semester as a college teacher. I was twenty-seven years old. In the buzz of the crowd moving up the hill, a graduate student was loudly finding a silver lining in his reported news: this unthinkable event would permanently discredit the right-wing fanatics of the John Birch Society, the MAGA-monsters of that age. Who could have suspected Kennedy was killed by the only Communist in Texas? Like most of my friends I greatly admired JFK. I also fancied that I had a personal connection with him. After all, in the middle of a hot, muggy day in July of 1958, as I sweated on the pavement in a coat and tie, I had seen the man himself in the flesh as he wheeled around the circular drive of Columbus Circle abutting Union Station in Washington. His open red convertible passed within ten feet of me as I stood waiting for the light to change. There was a good-looking blonde woman laughing in the passenger’s seat. It was all too perfect. Golden youth. Camelot. I could not have invented it if I tried. And now on Bascom Hill I suddenly learn he is probably dead.
But that was already the second presidential death announcement that I shall never be able to forget. On an April day of 1945, still a month short of my ninth birthday, I was walking through an alley shortcut in east Denver on my way home from school. I was in the company of a contemporary and neighbor whose name, I regret to say, has long since disappeared from my memory. But I shall never forget the encounter we had along the way. A woman was standing in the middle of her small, tidy back lawn, separated from the alleyway by a likewise tidy white picket fence. She was weeping profusely, and not very quietly. She was surprised to see us, and the sight of us seemed only to intensify her distress. “Boys,” she said, “boys! Boys…I have to tell you. Boys, our president is dead.” We knew who the President was and what “dead” means. But the news itself made less impression than it should. What I mainly grasped was that a woman was weeping uncontrollably. So far as my grasp of world events was concerned, the war news was all good. Hitler was “finished” according to a pontificating next-door neighbor. Soon we would “finish” Japan. Then my dad would be home from fighting in the Pacific. But I shall never forget that weeping woman.
I say “never forget”, though can I trust memory? Already Joan and I have somewhat differing accounts of learning of Queen Elizabeth’s death. We can agree that we were all gathered around a table when we heard the news, but disagree as to which table. In any event, the associations of the event will always be complex: the jarring intrusion of the news of death into a Provençal idyll.
