When I was 10, I really wanted to go to boarding school. Partly because my friend Julie had just gone, and taken with her a tweed coat with a velvet collar and a huge tuck box. It’s true that she had only gone because her mother had just died, but to me at that age it seemed a fair exchange, and I was sure that giving up one or other parent would make life a lot more peaceful too. I wanted to be posh because I wanted to fit in, and nobody I could then imagine would choose to fit into the close-knit world of a Glasgow tenement. So the escape from reality took the form of fantasies about Queen Charlotte’s ball and doing the Season.
My parents did not fit in to this stratum or any other of British society; a not-entirely Jewish German refugee, and the first person from her Yorkshire Quaker village to get to Cambridge, they were clearly both displaced persons, having spent the war respectively as an enemy alien and a conscientious objector. And they were mathematicians, which only made it worse. In consequence, we found ourselves in the mathematically fascinating set of people who don’t belong in any other set.
Until the invitation arrived from Buckingham Palace. It wasn’t the first time, but that had only been a garden party, and with my refined understanding of poshness I knew that those were for people who didn’t deserve individual attention and could be dispatched in batches. My mother came back grumbling that the cakes were Lyons’ French Fancies, and my father perplexed that his ice-breaker to Prince Philip hadn’t gone down so well (“Ah, yes, your highness. I think you were my cousin’s fag at Salem?” Combining a social putdown with a reference to the prince’s past at a training ground for the Waffen SS was a triumph, even for him.)
This time, only my mother was invited. To a select lunch, by the prince. Her mathematics weren’t as arcane as my dad’s, but her skills in running committees were second to none, and in addition to bludgeoning the Soviet Union into extending their olympiad to the entire world, she’d become president of the London Mathematical Society, of which the prince was patron. The lunch was her reward, but all she saw was an irritating requirement to obtain a hat.
Quakers have always had trouble with the symbolism of hats; in George Fox’s day they refused to take them off, and by now apparently having to put one on was an issue, especially when it involved the outlay of cash on something that would never be worn again. A week of mulling later, she dashed up to Peter Jones in her lunch-break, and came home triumphant, waving some offcuts of ribbon and lace, which she stitched together in 15 minutes before pinning it to her hair as she left.
Naturally, I was waiting by the front door when she got back, already planning my outfit for the first date with Prince Edward. “How was it? What did you eat?”
“Nothing!”
“Nothing?” What could they possibly have served that my mother would refuse – she who had once heated up the contents of an anonymous can left over from the war, and called it supper?
“It all looked delicious – I just didn’t get any.”
To understand why, we have to return to the prince’s education. After Salem, he had gone to its twin establishment, Gordonstoun, to which my dad had also gone, both having been founded by a cousin. So we were all familiar with the eccentricities of Gordonstoun mealtimes: nobody was allowed to ask for anything, only to hint that they might like some by offering it to somebody else. As an attempt to instil manners, this was totally contradicted by the other rule, that the people who finished their food soonest got second helpings.
Consequently, pupils learned to eat at warp speed. Combine this with the protocol of the royal lunch, at which the prince got served first and my mother, facing him at the other end, last, and the further twist that as soon as HRH finished all the other plates were removed, and you begin to understand how a person could have been present throughout a delicious lunch for 12 in the Daffodil dining room, and come back with nothing more than an eidetic memory of everybody else’s food. But it left me with a new dilemma: was it worth “fitting in” if it meant you starved?
Sheila Hayman blogs at mrsnormal.com
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