The celebrations marking the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II’s accession to the throne have turned my thoughts in an unexpected direction.
Not by the nostalgia - the Do you remember …? or even Where on earth have those 60 years gone to? … but by pondering how it is that children between the ages of, say, 4 and 7, rapidly develop the concept that they live in a larger world than that encompassed by, and understood through, intense interaction with & close focus upon family, home & the immediate environment, and then to develop an understanding of abstract concepts such as society, governance & history.
Since I am not an academic psychologist with the training & resources to study large numbers of children I am guided at the moment by my own personal experience, or at least by my memory of it.
The little girl who had been so bitterly disappointed because the Princess she was taken to see in 1949 did not in any way match the picture of a princess in the fairy stories had, within four years, acquired some understanding that she lived in a country called England with a capital city called London, had some notion of a government in the form of an hereditary monarch & a prime minister called Mr Churchill. And a notion of a wider world out there with other countries in it, as well as an impression of history. The new Queen was Elizabeth the Second because we once upon a time had an Elizabeth the First & adventurers such as Drake & Raleigh. Now I was privileged to be living in a new Elizabethan Age
I should pause here to say that I am not thinking – or writing - about this because I think there was something exceptional about her but because I have never before stopped to think about how extraordinary is this universal experience. I have always been entranced by how babies & toddlers develop & learn so quickly, but I guess I was too readily accepting of the idea that by the age of about 5 the brain has done all the growing it is ever going to do & from then on it is a question of learning through instruction, not of making the world for oneself.
But how did a little girl living on the edge of a rural town – open country on three sides - who had travelled no further than a few summer holidays in Blackpool or North Wales develop her ideas about this virtual world beyond the horizon.
Not via the internet, or even television – along with so many of my fellow countrymen I got my first sight of the box only on the day of the Coronation.
There was the radio, & the newspaper which I was beginning to take an interest in; even though there was a distinct lack of even grainy black & white pictures & I have clear memories of pictures of the new Queen on the steps of the aeroplane, the long queues winding round the dead King’s lying-in-state & of the three Queens at the funeral. The fact that Queen Mary’s obvious grief made a lasting impression makes me think I must have seen this on a cinema newsreel.
Even if these are actual memories of the time they must have been reinforced by all the activities – not least those at school - in the long period leading up to the Coronation itself.
