10 AUGUST Eton. Eton is standing in for the Palace of Westminster and the exteriors of the State Opening of Parliament at the start of the film. We film first in the cloisters, the walls of which are studded with memorial plaques to the dead of two world wars, the First War particularly. There are bronze plaques so dark as to be indecipherable, ceramic panels that look quite festive, a memorial to all the Etonians who died in the Grenadier Guards and umpteen tablets besides, some in self-conscious Latin to masters as well as boys, the conclusion of many of them, Floreat Etona.
   A dolly mounted with a ramshackle light-screen trundles the camera round the cloisters with the actors rushing along behind as the King argues with the Prince of Wales and the courtiers scurry after them, trying to keep up. What I hope we capture is how wanting in proper ceremony the eighteenth-century monarchy was; how slipshod and unmanaged were its public appearances, and, whatever the flummery, not much dignity about it at all.
   Then we shift to School Yard, where the MPs mass on the staircase by the chapel, watching the departure of the royal party. I sit by the statue of Henry VI (a pigeon feather caught on his nose) as the coaches wheel about the yard and Janine Duvitski as Margaret Nicholson rather shyly tries to assassinate the King. Afterwards I wander down the immaculately preserved High Street. Here is Coutts Bank and some smart tailor’s, established in the eighteenth century; there’s a grand photographer’s that looks as if it was established not long after, and other smart and elegant shops are hangers-on and camp-followers of the school.
   The message is plain: these boys are rich. And I hate it and feel the worse for hating it, because the school has been so helpful and co-operative over the film. I can see, though, that to be educated here isn’t an unmixed blessing and that afterwards it could, as in Cyril Connolly’s case, be downhill all the way, even the most lustrous Oxford or Cambridge college something of a comedown after all this.
   I go back to the filming to find Greville on camera, knocking at a door covered, as is most Eton woodwork, in ancient graffiti. Some of it, though, is not quite so ancient (or not ancient enough for us) and it’s only when we view the rushes that we see the date ‘1862’ large and plain on this door at which he is knocking in 1788.