Born three years after the accession of Queen Elizabeth, my memory is coloured by events, punctuated by sub-clauses, and swayed by the influences of this woman's life. In this regard I am no different from any other Australian over the age of say 40. How exactly to understand these traces in memory is more difficult to discern.
Those brought up with the Book of Common Prayer each Sunday of their childhood were asked to pray in intercessions for the Queen and all the royal family.
It was never explained then that we had the prayer book because we had the Queen, that the English Civil War had left scars on the English psyche which argued for centuries of monarchy. Australian hesitancy to adopt a republic is, I believe, explained in part by this British refusal ever to go back to the disasters of Cromwell.
My parents' generation were avid followers of the young Elizabeth. Teachers and elders read me A. A. Milne's poem about Christopher Robin going 'down with Alice' to Buckingham Palace, as though it were an everyday occurrence. That they themselves had never been to London was beside the point. They were in a constant state of going to watch the changing of the guard, even if it was only in their own minds.
A similar statement about the barriers between us and them, subjects and royals, was made by that defining artistic phenomenon of Elizabeth's reign, The Beatles. John Lennon sang about the miserly Mean Mr Mustard who 'goes out to look at the Queen, only place that he's ever been, always shouts something obscene', a warning to Little Englanders to get real and expand their horizons.
One curate in our parish was the complete royal watcher. He knew every twig of the family tree, could quote quintessential quips from court history and knew more about Mrs Simpson than was proper. He claimed to dream about the royal family regularly and believed everyone had dreams about them. It was pointed out to me once that he had no family of his own and the royal family was a helpful substitute.
This easy familiarity with an idealised dream family collapsed for me at the impressionable age of 20, when I had to absorb the dismissal of the elected