Clouds and Princess Diana (IP)

Princess Diana’s funeral. I shall never forget it and I didn’t watch a moment of it.
The country was consumed with it all. Mass grieving was under way and people need time to come to terms with it all.
I was distinctly out of kilter. I can’t stand the Royal Family or anything or anyone remotely concerned with it. It’s not personal, it’s political. I want to be a citizen, not a subject. I blame them for the perpetuation of the whole class system that does so much damage to this country. My wife wanted to watch it. So did the children.
“It’s important,” they told me.
“It’s important that we don’t watch it,” I said. I was firing blanks. They weren’t going to listen and I know when I’m not wanted. “I’m going out for a walk,” I said. “A long one.”
“Good. We don’t want you making snide comments all the way through.”
So I drove along the base of the South Downs and turned down the little lane that would take me to the base of the path up to Chanctonbury Ring. Normally it’s difficult to find somewhere to park. Today, it was deserted.
I set off up the track, past the huge mess of tangled roots that tumbled and jumbled out of the chalk bank. The children loved to play here. They made houses in the giant network and swung on the ropes the Scouts’ suspended from the branches. In the silence it was beautiful and I stood and contemplated the complexity and the glory of its random nature.
Up I climbed, through the trees, on and on, until just before the apex I came out in clear ground.
A blue sky with thick, white cumulus clouds greeted me. They moved sedately and steadily above me. I climbed on and, before turning right to the Ring itself, I lay down on the grass, my hands behind my head and watched them form and re-form. Faces, shapes, beasts appeared before me. The clouds merged and split, the bright blue sky standing sharp behind them.
I lay there and I lay there. I have no idea how long. I thought of friends I hadn’t seen in a while, of my father recently deceased, of the nature of beauty and the beauty of nature. I was miles away.
And then I became aware of a fellow walker. This normally busy section of the South Downs Way had been deserted all the while. I looked up and, completely relaxed as I was, my mouth acted before any part of my mind was in gear.
“Bloody Hell! Shouldn’t you be somewhere else?”
There she was, or at least the exact spitting image of her, brought to a standstill by my rudeness. Princess Bloody Diana.
She turned her perfectly coiffed head towards me and that shy little smile that tilted up at one side came across her face.
A voice so posh it could split granite: “Oh, come on. Give me a break old chap.”
“I’m sorry,” I stammered. “It’s just so weird, today of all days.”
She was dressed in the full Princess Di outfit. Light blue jacket, pearls sat neatly round her neck, crisp white shirt, pleated skirt to just below the knee, tan leather boots, the works.
“It’s tough for me too.”
She stood and looked at me.
“I could do with some company,” she said. “I’m going to Chanctonbury and then on to Cissbury. But I won’t talk about that or anything connected with it. It’s all just too, too dull.”
I was fascinated. Things do happen to me but this surely took the biscuit. I brushed myself off and we walked on, side by side, up the slope to Chanctonbury. I held the gate open for her and reset the latch. She stood as if it was natural. It always happened like this for her.
I told her I’d been looking at the clouds and how, even by cloud standards, they were special today.
She laughed, a high little trill.
“Ah, to stand and dream. How lovely.”
We talked about the Ring, how it had blown down in the hurricane of ‘87and we thought it would take another 20 or 30 years to even begin to reclaim its glory. We gazed across the flat wooded plain that stretched to the North Downs and Jane Austen country to our right. We imagined the strange rites that had taken place at the Ring and I constructed a fantasy of a magical war between the mystics of Chanctonbury and the military of Cissbury. Flights of fancy, rabbits skipping, not a soul around, birdsong whistling past on the breeze.
And every now and then I looked at her and realised I was on a walk with Princess Bloody Diana, having a laugh, on the day of her funeral.
Just before Cissbury she pulled me to one side.
“I put together a little basket on my way out,” she said. “Do share it with me. It would be a delight.”
And we stepped through a gate and out of the hedgerow she pulled a wicker basket containing a bottle of white wine and a silver foil packet of sandwiches, ham or cheese. Plain, fresh bread. Full fat butter. Apples and grapes. Cheese – local brie, something goaty and small bite of Stilton. Ritz Crackers – I hadn’t seen them in years. And cheese straws. Two glasses, two paper plates.
“Did you intend to share this?” I asked.
“You never know.” And she gave me one of those enigmatic sideways glances.
So, a little bit drunk, our stomachs satisfied, we lay back and looked at the clouds. We saw the faces together. One looked like Prince Philip but I didn’t mention it. We saw a lion’s mane and the head of a bird. We saw maps of islands and wondered what kind of people lived there.
Then it was done – and we both knew it at the same time.
We rose and wandered round the fortifications of Cissbury Ring. We talked of time past and I pointed out, at the base of the hill, where I found sloes last year and made sloe gin. She giggled, an upper class tinkle, and confessed to never having tried it. She put her hand on my arm and we looked each other in the eyes.
“My car is down there, in the car park. This is where we part.”
She leant towards me and kissed me lightly, but with a touch of linger, on the cheek.
“Thankyou for a glorious day.”
“And thank you for a lovely, and totally unexpected, picnic and the pleasure of your wonderful company. Someone, somewhere, is a very lucky man.”
“As is your wife.”
And she turned, and the smell of her washed over me, and I watched her down the hill. At the bottom she turned and saw me and waved, wriggling her fingers.
So I wandered back, past the magic of Chanctonbury and back down the hill past the tangled roots. There were people on the track now where there had been none before.
And when I got home they looked at me with suspicion, thinking I would kick off now. But I said not a word and cooked supper for us all. When the funeral came on the News I asked questions about it and they told me how moved they had been. And I didn’t comment. I told them I’d got all the way to Cissbury and my wife said she didn’t know you could connect to it across the top of the Downs and I told her I’d take her some day.
And I wondered.
And I still wonder...