As we prepare to celebrate King Charles' coronation, Derbyshire Life reader Elizabeth Harvey paints a vivid, evocative and personal picture of his mother's coronation, 70 years ago
Can it really be 70 years since I watched our mother tie red, white and blue ribbons onto my sister Linda’s plaits?
I was six, Linda eight, and this was the day we’d looked forward to - Queen Elizabeth was to be crowned.
Mum had made for us, on her old hand-cranked singer sewing machine, new matching dresses. We felt like princesses.
As a shy child I spent hours puzzling out the ways of the world. On this occasion, my bewilderment centred on why the Queen had chosen to be crowned on our big sister Margaret’s 18th birthday.
Since our schoolteacher father had been demobbed in 1945, our family home had been two-thirds of a historic house known as the Old Hall, at the east edge of Twyford green.
The quiet hamlet of Twyford (now a conservation area) is located three and a half miles from Repton. Back then, and still today, it consists of a small collection of varying styled houses plus a church spreading north of the river Trent.
No shops, pub, village hall, post office, not even our own vicarage and, at the time of the coronation, no phone line.
Still, we did boast a ferry dating to the early 1700s, plus a Victorian schoolroom - though, after 99 years of use, this had been closed for ten years due to too few children in the parish.
It was in the disused schoolroom that afternoon in June 1953 that there was to be a coronation get-together for our little community at which quiet, daydreaming, six-year-old me thought the Queen was to be crowned.
We had no TV, although we did have a crackly radio mum would listen to the songs of the day on.
Linda and I spend most of our days playing outside on the green or in the stream. Compared to today’s six-year-olds I was unaware of ‘the ways of the world’.
Around 11am our family met with other villages at a neighbouring farmhouse to watch the coronation on a television bought specially for the occasion - in the early 1950s a 12inch TV cost around £80 – with average pay approximately £9 a week.
Linda and I sat crossed-legged in front of the adults. Despite many a flicker and being in black and white the coronation was magical. Nevertheless, with the service almost three hours, and the floor hard, I recall our father telling us more than once to ‘sit still’.
Having seen the Queen crowned my new puzzlement was: ‘would she travel all the way to Twyford in her beautiful, golden coach?’
We three sisters walked together to the schoolroom, Margaret explaining the Queen was not actually going to come to our village party. I felt disappointed and lagged behind. The sky darkened and heavy drops of rain started to fall. We ran.
Once inside all was bright, everywhere being decked with coronation colours. Around the walls stood trestle tables covered with white linen cloths and laid with a feast that, to my unsophisticated young eyes, the Queen would be sorry to have missed.
Plates and plates of sandwiches, pork pies, sausage rolls, cakes and, best of all, jellies, blancmange and trifles - everything homemade.
Many foods were still rationed. However, there was a special concession by Churchill’s government to celebrate the coronation, with each household allowed to buy an additional 1lb of sugar and 4oz of margarine.
Even so, the village housewives must have saved their precious rations where they could to have sufficient to put on such an extensive spread.
At the end of the schoolroom there was a table with a sea of white cups upside down on sources, surrounding a great shiny tea urn.
This was presided over by Mable, a large lady who worked the chain-pulled ferryboat over the river at the bottom of the village.
I was a bit afraid of Mable which was a shame because, as well as being in charge of the tea, she guarded a delicious-looking jug of homemade lemonade.
From great grandmas to a babe in arms, farmworkers to the lady from the ‘big house’, our approximate 60 population soon gathered. We ate, drank and made merry, while the summer rain beat against the windows.
I don’t recall if we played games, an atmosphere of talk and laughter filled the room. With much gusto everyone sang ‘God Save The Queen’ then, later, ‘Happy Birthday’ to Margaret.
As the festivities drew to a close the young received gifts. Linda and I and the only other girl of our age from the village, Frances, were given a parasol each.
I loved my parasol. In the weeks that followed I pleaded with our mother to let me take it to school -we went in Finden, travelling the three miles in an old black taxi.
Eventually mum relented. However, one of the ‘big girls’ coaxed and cajoled and finally convinced me to part with my treasured parasol in exchange for some doll’s clothes. These, she promised to bring the following day.
With childish anticipation, I waited for the next day, and the next, and the next. I never did get the doll's clothes ─ or my parasol back.
Perhaps because the coronation celebrations had given the ladies chance to indulge their culinary skills after the post-war austerity, they had got a little carried away.
They had over-catered to such an extent only half the food was eaten. So, the following afternoon, we all went back for a second party and, once again, with much enthusiasm, sang ‘God Save The Queen’.
