THE HOLDER OF THE CROWN

A little idea after watching the Queen's Speech on television.

It was a monumentally fancy hat that the man in fancy dress carried on a cushion out of the great hall. It wasn’t much of a job, to tell the truth, but it was one he had fancied all of his adult life and most of his childhood, ever since a bad day when he’d been too young to deserve bad days

Indeed, he’d been huddled in one hidden corner of the playground at his preparatory school when he’d been ten, and a good half the other boys picked on him unmercifully because of his hat. And they not only picked on him, they bullied him too and one little Herbert actually grabbed that hat and shoved it up his shorts.

It had been then that he decided he would never wear that hat again.

It was a perfectly ordinary school cap with a peak and badge proclaiming his membership of the very special school his parents could only just afford to send him to, but it had been subject to a spillage. It hadn’t been his fault. Another boy had done it out of spite because that’s the sort of thing some boys do, especially spoilt boys from rich families, and just about all the boys at that particular school were those. Even small boys of ten or so could do it.

And the spillage had been blue-black ink. Permanent blue-black ink, and permanent did mean permanent as he discovered when he tried to rid the peak of that cap of an awful blue-black stain.

And it was that stain the other boys thought was so offensive they needed to tease him and bully him and push the cap up his smart grey shorts in such a way that it hurt him.

And he decided there and then that he would one day be famous for a hat. Sod the little monsters who thought ink was cause for bullying, sod them for hurting him and humiliating him and sod them for being alive.

There: he’d thought it.

So he set himself a single task, the one thing that would define his life, and it had to do with the most famous hat in all the land.

It had to do with the Queen’s crown!

He would become the one man in all the land who cared for that hat. He would polish it and wipe smears from its encrustation of gemstones and make sure that it was fit to be placed on the noblest head in the land.

“You’ll need to study hard!” his mother told him most severely as she struggled trying to clean his school cap, and failed miserably. “This ink is permanent!” she added.

“You’ve been a very naughty boy!” his father raged, “and in my day you would have been whipped for getting ink all over your school cap! In my day you would have had many strokes of a bamboo cane until your fingers felt as if they were falling off! Just look at you! I swear that by the time you’re twelve you’ll be a junkie living in the gutter, and serve you right!”

“But it wasn’t my fault!” he protested, but his words fell on deaf ears.

To his father he was already that junkie and the gutter was just outside the house.

The next day he had to wear that cap when he went back to his expensive prep school, and the next day he was bullied again because the cap looked even worse. His mother, far from removing even one smidgen of the ink had worn a huge patch that was any colour but what it was meant to be.

The Headmaster was appalled, and threatened him with his stick.

“This is a very special school for really special boys who are to grow up and rule the whole country!” he thundered. “And we only have one rule and that is you turn up every day neat and tidy without ink on your precious caps!”

“But it wasn’t my fault,” he protested, and the Headmaster crashed his stick down onto his bottom until he felt as if he might be sick.

“And that’s for lying and not facing up to your guilt!” he roared. “At this school we teach responsibility, and you’ve got to learn to take it!”

That episode put him right off the idea of going to school and when he went home that night he showed his parents his sore and striped bottom and demanded a new cap.

“So you’ve been bad, have you?” raged his father, “well, let me tell you this: in my day if a boy was punished at school he got a second dose of it at home if his parents found out! And we’ve found out, so there’s a second dose for you!”

The next day his mother produced a brand new cap, though it was two sizes too big because, as she explained, a school cap costs quite a lot of money and he’ll have to wear this one until he no longer needs it. Until, in fact, he’s grown into it. Until he leaves that very special school.

The next day he was bullied at school despite his brand new cap, and some bright spark thought it a real jest to spill a whole bottle of blue-black permanent ink onto it when it was hanging up in the cloakroom.

It broke his heart and he didn’t go staright home that night.

He daren’t.

Instead he went to the library until it closed and looked at a lot of books. And the book he liked best had to do with the history of kings and queens and the things they wore.

Especially their crowns.

The next day he found himself being really, really naughty, by popping into the school uniform outfitter’s shop on his way to school, where he carefully and wickedly and without being caught stole a school cap because the whole idea of more bullying and being struck by cruel sticks and warned he would end up as a junkie in the gutter really frightened him.

At about that time the bullies found someone else to bully, probably because he spent every break and every lunch hour sitting on the toilet behind a locked door, safely away from nasty boys and blue-black ink. And with him, to the school toilet, he took the library book that he loved, about regalia and black rods and ermine … and crowns.

All of which set him onto the road to today.

To walking through a great hall carrying an ornate cushion on which the Queen’s crown was balanced.

And not a drop of blue-black permanent ink anywhere.

It was a pity, though, when he stumbled and only just managed…

...only just managed to stop the crown…

...from smashing on a hard flagged floor…

...that a battery of cameras were on him and he knew, he absolutely knew for absolute certainty that the bullies would be round the next corner, waiting for him, to grab that hat and push it fair and square up his ermine-trimmed trouser legs where diamonds and gemstones would cut him to shreds, and he’d bleed at last to death.

© Peter Rogerson 21.06.17