Even from a young age, I could tell that my Grandma was a bit of a sentimental royal-watcher. She tended to have books about the royal family kicking about. She particularly seemed to take pride in her resemblance to the Queen. The best compliment that each my grandfather and I (at a young age, because of a fur hat she was wearing) ever paid her was to tell her that she looked like the Queen. She lived off of those compliments for ages.
(In fact, my Grandma stopped dyeing her hair dark brown when the Queen let hers go grey. If white hair was good enough for the Queen...)
A few years ago, I discovered what I suspect were some of the roots of this particular feeling of closeness. We were all in a waiting room at my grandfather's nursing home, about a week before he died. We were all waiting to be able to see him, and to pass the time and to distract ourselves from our worry, I told my Grandma about the course I was taking on Canada in the Depression and the Second World War. She was really excited that I would take such a course, and started related to me many of her reminiscenses of living on the prairies during the Dirty Thirties (where Saskatchewan was hit not only with stock market collapse and unemployment, but severe drought and plagues of grasshoppers). I got telling Grandma about the paper I was writing for the course, about the 1939 Royal Visit when George VI and Elizabeth (whom I knew as the Queen Mother) travelled by train across Canada to huge crowds along the way. Their reception in the prairies was particularly enthusiastic, with thousands even showing up at train stations along the line where there were not planned stops. I had been sorting through newspaper reports about the visit at that time, and had been astounded by all the purple press, and especially by the number of times the Queen had been called "radiant."
Grandma got really excited when I started telling her about my project. She informed me that she had travelled to the town of Unity for that day, because it had a station along the line. There had not been a stop planned there, but a huge crowd gathered (a newspaper report I later read claimed that there were 5000 people at that stop). Grandma's memories of that day were even clearer and more detailed than most of her stories, even though I'd never heard her tell of this before. She got to the station early and managed to get pretty close. She wore something pretty. And, fortunately, the King and Queen ended up stopping there, unlike many towns where bands were playing "God Save the King" as the train sped through. In fact, they ended up spending nearly half an hour, which was quite a long stop for that trip. The royal couple were very kind and Grandma got a good look at them.
"The King looked tired, but of course he was not well. But the Queen!" Grandma's eyes lit up. "The Queen was radiant."
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