Flick Rea was back in the council chamber for last night’s meeting

ALDERMAN and former Camden councillor Flick Rea has shared memories of the Queen – including a quick discussion of a missing Vermeer painting.

She was speaking as Camden Council held a special all-member meeting last night (Monday) in which councillors, aldermen, members of the public and Town Hall staff paid tribute to the Queen.

Here is what Ms Rea said:

“As almost the oldest person in this chamber, I beg your forgiveness to go back a few years. I was born in 1938, when we had a new king, or a fairly new king with a young family and I grew up on the legend of the little princesses. They were icons for my little girl generation.

We had pictures of them. We had stories about them in women’s magazines. We knew about the little princesses, albeit they were 10-12 years older than us.

But I grew up with this picture of these two young girls in my mind and after the war and the victory celebrations, and seeing the fact that the Queen as she was, Princess Elizabeth, was still a young woman, I was entranced like most of my generation by her romantic wedding to the wonderful sailor prince whom we all instantly fell in love with.

He came to open some playing fields in my town and we all just went: Oh, he’s beautiful. We were all rather envious, I think.

Then there were sad, sad moments, of course. I can remember the King really well. I once, after the war, saw him at an agricultural show. He was thin. He was frail looking, and slight. Like most of the royal family, he was quite small.

And the queen mother with a wonderful smile. I saw them then.

And then you saw those pictures at the airport of him waving goodbye to his beloved daughter for the last time and the shock of his death was so much more because he was only in his 50s and the mourning was incredible.

The papers all had black edges. There were portraits everywhere, because I don’t know whether people had realised how ill he was – but it was a shock for us all.

And then there was the wonderful moment when Elizabeth arrived and suddenly we were into a new Elizabethan age and the coronation… and climbing Everest and breaking the four minute mile. All this was happening.

We were told that it was going to be a great new Elizabethan era. Most of us bought televisions to watch the coronation and it was so exciting. I say ‘most of us’, but there was one in every street or one in every family and you all got together and watched on these quite small screens.

She became a constant in my life and it’s a bit like now looking up at the evening sky, and not seeing the Pole Star. There’s something missing and it will remain missing, probably for the rest of my life.

I have one small personal anecdote, which I will share. It’s quite brief. I once went on a tour with a friend of mine who was a tour guide around Buckingham Palace in advance of the public. And we went to the picture gallery and I said to my friend ‘oh look, I didn’t know the Queen had a Vermeer’ because I was into arts and culture at the time.

She said: ‘No, it’s not a Vermeer’, and I said ‘it is’ – and I asked the chap sitting there,and he said ‘oh, yes it’s a Vermeer’. I said ‘there you are, it is a Vermeer’.

About two years later, possibly less, I was invited to an evening reception at the Palace and we all made our formal bows and curtsies and were introduced and then we moved into the picture gallery.

I was standing with a group of mostly writers. It was a cultural reception. I looked up at the wall and the Vermeer wasn’t there. So when the Queen came down the line of us all and stopped to speak to our particular group, I nerved myself to say: May I ask a question, Ma’am?

‘Yes, of course’.

So I said: ‘Do tell me, do you know what’s happened to your Vermeer?’

And she said: ‘No, I’m not sure’. She said ‘I expect they’ve moved it – they do move things around, you know?’

Flick Rea doing an impersonation of the Queen wondering where her Vermeer painting had gone

So I said, ‘perhaps it’s on loan to an exhibition Ma’am?’ And she said: ‘Yes, I expect it is. I shall find out’. And then she moved on.

But it was just the sheer sort of ordinariness of somebody saying something like ‘I don’t know where I put the breadboard’. It was just a lovely human moment. It’s my own the anecdote, my only moment – but I wanted to share it and I wanted to say thank you.

In the fashion of what appears to be the new king, and his passion for Shakespeare, I’m going to  misquote slightly and say: You that are young will never see so much. Nor live so long.”