How small she looked on the town’s makeshift throne!

How bored and miserable and alone, how remote and marooned and cut-off from the world.

All day he’d found himself wishing they’d thought of something in every way more exciting and unusual. Fireworks perhaps. Acrobats, magicians. Anything that would enliven her sad doughy face and bring a sparkle of interest to her half-closed eyes and help her forget, just for a moment, that after all these years she was still bereft.

And then the moment had arrived for the presentation of the gifts – Mr. Boucher’s Morocco-bound History of the Town, Mr. Binns’ map of Lancashire, Mrs Maudesely’s commemorative cake – the moment when he, alderman Arthur Pritt, was to stand at the old Queen’s shoulder and murmur a few words of introduction and explanation as each new offering was brought up onto the platform.

For a while he had held Boucher’s History of the Town and quietly turned its gilt-edged pages, hunting for items that might kindle her interest or otherwise lift her leaden spirits. Obediently he had highlighted the illustrations of the linoleum factory, the wallpaper works, the brewery, the old bridge and the new bridge, the Priory and the lumpy piece of ground below the castle where the Roman Baths had once been. The Queen had continued, though, to sit like a stone, a poor unhappy tortoise, and as Binns’s map was lifted up onto the crimson-covered platform and propped up before her between two rows of greenhouse plants in their earthenware pots, Arthur had decided he could no longer go on, and glancing quickly at her son the Prince who stood next to his mother on her other side, he began, in a soft whisper close to her ear, to apologise.

His name was Arthur Pritt, he said, and he was sorry for the day.

He was sorry they had not thought of something beautiful and exciting. Fireworks perhaps or acrobats. A magician. He said he wished that in the many, many meetings he’d attended with the other aldermen and the Town Clerk and the Treasurer and the Mayor, and in all the letters that had been exchanged between the Corporation and her Secretary of State on the question of how things should be organised, they had not thought of arranging things a little differently for once.

The Queen’s face didn’t move. Her mouth seemed locked by its downturned corners into the deepest and most immovable frown.