When I was four, my grandfather told me a bedtime story about a bespectacled orphan who was my namesake. This fictional Sophie was kidnapped one night from her orphanage bed by a dream-blowing giant; a big, friendly one. The giant is a vegetarian pacifist: an anomaly among his brethren in giant country – murderous bone crunchers, who love a human feast. After becoming friends, the peaceful giant and little Sophie come up with a plot to save the world from being eaten by the people guzzlers. They travel to Buckingham Palace to enlist the help of none other than the Queen of England. Because, honestly, who better?
I wonder if this story, an early incarnation of The BFG, was partly responsible for shaping my feelings about Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II. At five, I wrote her a long letter about my dogs, because I knew intuitively she would understand the love I felt for them. A polite response from a secretary assured me that she did.
The Queen has been a steadfast backdrop to British life for as long as most of us can remember. She bore witness to 70 years of prime ministers, the Blitz, austerity, global change and a worldwide pandemic. In the face of the last, her words were heartfelt and reassuring – from one who has seen hard times yet knows the great world continues to spin: ‘We should take comfort that, while we may have more still to endure, better days will return.’
What she didn’t say was equally telling – her wry, powder-blue eyes speaking volumes. When opening an exhibition of Lucian Freud’s paintings, many of them nudes, the Queen was asked if she had ever been painted by him. The eyes twinkling, Her Majesty smiled and said, ‘Yes, but not like that.’
Malcolm Gladwell wrote in his book Outliers that, in order to excel at something, you need to devote 10,000 hours to its practice. The Queen has been monarch for 613,620 hours. She’s put the time in.
In this, her Platinum Jubilee year, she encouraged the nation to plant trees, under an initiative called The Queen’s Green Canopy. In the grounds of Windsor Castle, alongside her son Charles, she planted a Verdun oak. These were grown in abundance in the UK after the First World War from acorns born of the battlefield at Verdun, to honour the lost. They grow to be giants.
Many years ago, I was invited to Buckingham Palace for a children’s event championing literacy, planned around the Queen’s 80th birthday. As part of it, a film was made, shot in the ballroom, in which I played the adult Sophie, living at Buckingham Palace with the BFG. It culminated in a surreal, madcap performance in the garden involving a host of national treasures, book characters, 2,000 children and me, waving nervously from inside Thomas the Tank Engine. Afterwards, I was presented to Her Majesty. She was warm and funny, and made a joke about how I must be au fait with the layout of the place, having lived there since I was a child.
She’s such a part of our cultural vernacular, we can all conjure postcard images of her: bobbed and playing with her little sister Margaret and their dogs; a young woman, solemn and fatherless in Westminster Abbey, wearing a heavy crown; and, in a tinny evening broadcast, thanking those who sustained her Coronation Day with their thoughts and prayers. Laughing with her mother at the races; placing a wreath on the Cenotaph; arm in arm with Michelle Obama; beaming at her great-grandchildren; alone and achingly composed at the funeral of her husband of 73 years.
The Queen lives in the fabric of this complicated island, bound to us by circumstance and her extraordinary sense of duty. Her joys and griefs, triumphs and tribulations, navigated under a spotlight. It must be quite a dance. I hope she has had some peace and quiet, a chance to sit in her own green garden.
‘What happens when a giant dies?’ Sophie asked. ‘Giants is never dying,’ the BFG answered. ‘Sometimes and quite suddenly, a giant is disappearing and nobody is ever knowing where he goes to. But mostly us giants is simply going on and on like whiffsy time-twiddlers.’ To 70 years – and giants, big and small.
