Holding a Heart
My stomach dropped when I saw the news alert on Friday about Prince Philip. I had woken up the ChickieNob a few minutes earlier and had to double back to her room to give her the news. It was a hard morning made a little easier by a cousin who texted her before school to let her know that she was sad for the Queen, too.
Years ago, we came up with a plan—our own Tay Bridge—for what happens in the event of a royal death. The ChickieNob worked out which royals meant the most to her; the ones she would want to leave school for and process at home and the ones where she would feel sad but could ultimately keep moving through her day. Prince Philip was near the top of the list, just under the Queen.
He’s a complicated person, the Queen’s “strength and stay” and everyone else’s untranslatable. But he was the first royal who wrote back the ChickieNob, which bumped up his placement in her heart. She wrote him before Scotland because our trip coincided with Holyrood Week, and he wrote back after she returned. At that point, he had retired from public life, and she didn’t think there was a chance that he would answer. But there was the return letter in our mailbox, stamped from the palace. He hoped she had been able to partake in the Holyrood Week festivities.
With a letter, he created a tiny thread in history. And there is nothing that the ChickieNob loves more than history and its complicated, interesting humans.
3 comments
Oh, how nice that she got a personal response!! I’ve heard of people getting responses from ladies in waiting & such (my best friend from high school got one of those when she wrote to Prince Andrew, asking if he wanted to be penpals, lol) but how lovely that he took the time to respond personally to a young girl. It is certainly, if not the end of an era, a sign that a particular era in history is coming to a close. 🙁
We saw the Queen, Prince Philip, Prince Charles and Princess Anne in Dauphin, Manitoba (about 45 minutes from where we were living at the time), in July 1970, when they came to help celebrate the province of Manitoba’s centennial. I was 9 & my sister was not quite 8. There was an open-air church service at the fairground grandstand. My grandparents came for the occasion and my sister & I wore the new dresses we’d had made for our aunt’s wedding a few weeks earlier. Prince Philip read the lesson, and he & the Queen drove right past us in an open-air convertible on the way out, so close my grandfather said he could have reached out and touched them.
I remember several years later (late 70s/early 80s), Philip was coming to Winnipeg to speak at a fundraiser for a local hospital. The morning DJ on the radio station I listened to decided he was going to call Buckingham Palace and ask Prince Philip to bring along one of those tall fur hats the guards wear. It was kind of a joke, but believe it or not, he actually got put through and talked to Philip, and Philip said he would see what he could do. The hat was sent in advance and they auctioned it off with proceeds going to the hospital. The DJ was absolutely stunned when he actually got through — but he was very polite and did remember to address him as “Your Royal Highness,” lol.
That is really lovely. I’m not surprised the ChickieNob is a fan. Philip could not be described as dull! I saw him (and the Queen though I’m not sure if any of the kids were there) in I think 1974 when I was still at primary school, when they visited Timaru, the closest city to us. After they had done the walkabout thing, we wandered down to the port to see the Britannia. It was all very exciting!
Funny … N. and I were just talking about British monachy (and its relationship to Parliament) to her the other day, and he came up. She was sad about Prince Phillip’s passing. How sweet that the ChickieNob has a letter to remember him by!