When a great oak falls, the view changes. The evolving landscape was always there but you are more aware of it, curiosity mingling with regret. It happens whenever we lose a great figure at a great age: whether a Mandela or Churchill, deep in the politics of their age, or an artist who spanned its taste like Chuck Berry or Picasso.
With younger deaths there is just an aching, irritable sense of unfairness: they had more to give us. But losing someone in their ninth or tenth decade promotes a mellower feeling: a long race run, an era ended. The ending of King Lear echoes: “The oldest hath borne most: we that are young shall never see so much, nor live so long”.
We look back dizzily down the mountain of their years, notice how much change they saw, and wonder what virtues and beliefs helped them adapt. Then, as the view ahead opens, a kind of panic says, “we shall not look upon their like again”, almost as if they were another species.
The Duke of Edinburgh’s death brought all of these reactions, magnified by his national significance. We were reminded how he lived through a fractured childhood, wartime service, vast social and scientific changes, and the transformation of an empire into a commonwealth. We heard how he championed youth and progress and persuaded a stiff, remote Edwardian royalty not only to accept impertinent personal scrutiny but
to tolerate and use it for good.
I began the weekend of sad reflection thinking about him mainly as an exemplar of unfashionable virtues: ambition-crushing service to an institution, marital constancy, patriotism. The eulogies celebrated his championing of new science and technology and the environment, but on the whole we found ourselves contemplating a life ruled by older ideals: a character forged in wartime combat and old-fashioned dutiful decorum, willingly restricting personal liberty.
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It raises an interesting question: which of these qualities will be admired and sought in the next 99 years? The social current has swept us into an age of other priorities: self-conscious self-realisation, a duty to appreciate your uniqueness and follow your private dreams at any cost. New shibboleths require you to cultivate extremes of respect not only for every race but every creed and lifestyle. Old simplicities and standards are blurred by ideas of “non-judgmental” compassion and understanding, carefully purged of any attempt at “appropriation” and enforced on pain of contumely and cancelling. These new ideals feel more complicated. Whether or not they are actually morally better is for each of us to decide. Or bicker over on Twitter, if we must.
But thinking about the Prince Philip I met and genuinely liked when we were both National Maritime Museum trustees, it was another quality that surfaced: one that is a useful saving grace in any era. A favourite clip circulating online is of Romilly Weeks of ITV reporting on the couple’s 60th wedding anniversary visit to Malta. The duke, walking by, pauses behind her with a quizzical stare just as she informs the world he’s making a “romantic gesture”. As she turns startled, he blandly asks “You finished?” and moves on, leaving them both laughing. Not bad at 85: taking the rip out of a reporter’s soppy line with unresentful elegance, despite a lifetime of having your intimate feelings second-guessed and analysed by total strangers. Hard not to make the contrast with his touchily offended, expatriate grandson: I suspect many will.
Maybe, whatever the virtues demanded by the era you live in, the important one to hang on to is that blessed streak of levity: an acceptance that for all the disappointment and loss and bereavement and vain effort, life is actually a bit absurd. Whether you’re a royal consort, a weary wage-slave or a healthcare worker in a pandemic, somewhere just short
of your deepest religious or ideological faith lies a reminder that, well, you gotta laugh. Sometimes that has to mean black humour. Ask any soldier.
HRH knew that. His demeanour, sailor-like, always reminded me of Ralph Richardson’s teasing description of Laurence Olivier during his brief Royal Navy service: “The gold wings on his sleeve had no distasteful glitter. Only the shoes shone. His manner was naval: quiet, alert, businesslike, always with the air of there being a joke somewhere around.” That fits the Duke of Edinburgh well.
A favourite memory of mine is when I invited him to read at one of the National Maritime Museum’s “Seawords” evenings of nautical song and poetry in the Trafalgar Tavern pub in Greenwich. He probably suspected that the more solemn and sentimental stuff would be there already — it was, and the great Charles Dibdin song lamenting Tom Bowling moved him visibly. But for his own readings he chose first a comic account by the sailor Uffa Fox of a mishap with a rubber raft, and then, doing all the voices, read the passage in Three Men in a Boat about being towed by gigglingly inefficient girls. Not PC, but funny. And to be fair, if you’ve ever been a schoolgirl, not wholly inaccurate.
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So I’m glad that so many of the memories over the weekend were about the duke’s laughter. The older we get, the more we need that saving levity. The enigmatic Chinese figures in WB Yeats’s poem Lapis Lazuli look from their mountaintop and see beyond the world’s sorrow: “Gaiety transfiguring all that dread . . . mid many wrinkles their eyes, their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay”.
That’s the way to grow old.