At the end of last week, driving up the West Side Highway in downtown Manhattan, we passed the site of the 9/11 memorial. Inside the car on the radio, pundits argued about an averted rail strike and documents seized at Mar-a-Lago. Outside, barriers stood to one side from the previous weekend’s ceremony marking the anniversary of the attacks. As Britain closed out its second week of official mourning for the Queen, much of the US had already moved on.
If this disjunct is inevitable, it still gives rise to a strange, split-screen reality for those living in the US with attachments in Britain. Even on the day of the Queen’s death, a note of cautious irony leavened some of the commentary in the US. “Sorry about your Queen,” said friends, parents at the school gate and, for a day or two, every American I encountered who registered my accent. The condolences were well meant, but it was impossible to miss the mildly amused inquiry underlying them. Roughly: how bothered are you by this? And the corollary: aren’t you people – in the nicest way possible – a tiny bit faking it?
I would hazard that, on day one, two, or at a push maybe three, any British person enjoying a regular relationship with the monarchy – in my case, part affection, part scepticism, with occasional violent gusts of dislike – was not faking it. All the things said already are true; if the Queen’s advanced age made her death predictable, it also made the idea of her absence more shocking. She had always been there and now she wasn’t. An entire age, spanning more than three generations, had passed. As these things tend to, it made many of us feel older. That first afternoon, I cried, briefly, then called an Australian friend in New York, a news reporter who’d been dreading this moment for years. “Jesus Christ, I just cried,” she said, sounding utterly amazed.
That lasted a day. After the first shock had subsided, however, I suspect the experience of the Queen’s death differed wildly depending on location. It is a little dismaying to discover how indexed one’s emotional life is to the news cycle of the country one happens to be living in. Within three days, in the US, Queen-related news had dropped below the fold in most newspapers, displaced by news from Ukraine, anticipation of the forthcoming midterms, and Senator Lindsey Graham’s definition of “late-term” abortion as 15 weeks. Beyond reach of the UK’s unceasing media coverage – without sober BBC anchors to nudge us along – we moved on, too. There were other things.
Not in Britain, clearly. As this last week has unfolded, the news at home has looked increasingly bizarre. Cancelled hospital appointments, dark theatres, the ad-hoc attempt in supermarkets to match the mood of the nation with sombre music. It’s not, as some Americans have implied to me, that any of this is a question of faking it. It’s also true that, in any news event of this scale, there is a recreational aspect to joining in. These things come around once every few decades – events big enough to unify our atomised lives – and it can feel good to belong. “Fun” is a tasteless characterisation, but you could see, in the crowds outside Buckingham Palace shouting “God save the King!” a frisson of excitement; the novelty of that phrase, and indeed, the novelty of deciding to fall in behind Charles. If there’s a tiny element of cosplaying in all this, it is the decision by millions of Britains to embrace, briefly, the position of subject. It can be satisfying to play one’s prescribed role.
None of these dynamics travel far beyond British borders. To my kids, the Queen is a figure they largely know through Peppa Pig. I tried to explain the principle of hereditary monarchy, with a quick digression around the historical unfairness of male primogeniture. As friends posted photos of taking their children to see the flowers outside Buckingham Palace, I felt fleetingly sad they were missing out. If this moment became a generational marker – as watching the wedding of Charles and Diana on TV was when I was their age – they would have nothing to remember. After some discussion, we agreed that it wouldn’t have been fun to be Queen because it narrowed the field of one’s options. “Why did she do it, then?” said my daughter. There are words we don’t often use, which can surface to ambush us. “Duty,” I said, and quickly looked away.
• Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
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