Guest post by AL Kennedy
At the beginning of her 1965 novel “The Girls of Slender Means,” Scottish writer Muriel Spark describes a huge crowd gathering around Buckingham Palace in London in 1945 to celebrate the end of European hostilities in World War II Celebrating World War. Unwaveringly clear-sighted as always, she shows the chaos, the joy and the strange energy of a people liberated from war after many years of terror. The royal family appears periodically on the balcony of the palace, like tiny figures in a distant cuckoo clock: “…their hands fluttered as if in a light breeze, they were three candles in uniform and another in the well covered by the fur trim recognizable costume of a civilian queen in times of war.” After the four members of the royal family have disappeared from the balcony, couples form in the crowd who, in the darkness, begin to father “numerous children of experimental variety, attractive in skin color and racial structure.” I’ll just leave this quote as it is – in case you like foreshadowing.