‘I am writing in the strictest confidence to inform you that you have been recommended to Her Majesty the Queen for the honour of DBE in the New Year 2021 Honours List. Before the Prime Minister submits your name to Her Majesty the Queen for approval, we would be glad to know that this would be agreeable to you.’
No, no it wouldn’t.
I don’t feel at all agreeable. I feel sick with inadequacy. A lifetime of getting away with it does not merit reward. What if the Queen disapproves and rejects me?
Prince Philip: It is all going a bit downmarket isn’t it?
The Queen: Well, she is very good in Just a Minute.
Prince Philip: But what about Wildcats of St Trinian’s?
Should I turn it down? It’s hardly in keeping with my Quaker belief of equality. No, that would be dreadfully rude and ungracious.
I can’t even discuss it with anyone because it is ‘in confidence’. And we are all locked down anyway.
For heaven’s sake, why am I not jumping up and down with delight? A while ago, I probably would’ve been. But recent years have depleted my delight quotient, and jumping up and down is physically beyond me.
Oh Lord, maybe that is why they are giving me this, because I am old, and can cross a stage without falling over, and can handle a canal boat. Can? Could. Should I phone and tell them that may no longer be true?
I have passed supposedly disturbing milestones – my fiftieth, seventieth, even my eightieth birthday – without a qualm, only to be, as I approach ninety, shaken to my core by the shocking realisation that I am now very, very old. Physically, mentally, in my attitude, my health, my outlook, I am suddenly falling apart. ‘Old age ain’t no place for cissies.’ It was the Queen’s own mother who quoted this comment made by Bette Davis. The word ‘cissies’ has somewhat dubious connotations now, but she meant being weak and fearful. Neither of which, when I worked with her in the latter years of her career, Bette, or, it would seem, the Queen Mother, appeared to be. Nor did I, I suppose. Till now. As I hold the letter, this cissy’s hand is shaking.
Why have they bestowed this on me? Who are the ‘independent Main Honours Committee’ that will instruct the prime minister to embarrass the Queen?
Again.
The Queen: First he asks me to prorogue Parliament. Now this.
There is a bit in the letter that says: There is a clear expectation that those invited to receive an honour are, and will continue to be, role models.
What!?
I wish this mystery committee would show me a copy of their ‘independent assessment’, so I can see what I have to continue with. Why have they trusted me with this mission? It is very nice of them all to have thought of me, but who do they think I am? Was? Will be? What is my ‘role’? Have they miscast me? I am not really the public persona, the show-off, the strong woman, the national treasure, the – the – Dame. Should I confess that to them?
What kind of role model is someone who, like Macbeth, feels ‘I have lived long enough. My way of life is fallen into the sere, the yellow leaf’? (Someone who is beyond caring that, in our profession, mentioning Shakespeare’s Scottish king by name can be disastrous.) Everything I believed in, and in my small way fought for, has seemingly been abandoned. With Yeats, I feel ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.’ I am hopeless in all senses of the word. Where is the wisdom that is meant to come with age? Where the contentment? My daughters are scarred. My achievements are risible. What an utter, utter waste of time, a lifetime, it has all been. Should they be told that’s what I’m really like before they bother the Queen?
I am grateful. They have offered me something wonderful, beyond the wildest ambitions of my mum and dad for their daughter. Three years ago, I might have rejoiced, but now, facing the New Year’s Eve when my family would learn about the secret honour, sheltering alone at home, battered by various events, with death uncomfortably near, I am afraid I really don’t feel very agreeable.
Not today. Tomorrow may be different. Let’s hope. The whole world is living in hope at the moment.
In 2016 I began writing a book that I hoped would be a gentle record of a fulfilled old age. An inspirational journey. It hasn’t turned out like that. As I wrote it, my own and the wider world descended into chaos.
Yet it started so well.