Winston stood pensively, observing this announcement of a new season. I romped around the circuit of flowers, taking in the scents and shapes and colours. Margaret proceeded directly to the place in the flowerbeds where she used to bury her bones. The earth was freshly dug and loose, in itself not a promising development. Making fast progress, she scooped below the surface, first in one place then another, before turning with a mournful expression and nose covered in potting mix. ‘Gone! All of them. They’ve taken the lot!’
I set off immediately for the outdoor shed housing the garbage bins. The whole area had been cleaned up including, I soon discovered, my own small collection of bones, nowhere to be seen. Returning to the others I followed where both Margaret and Winston were looking towards the flowerpots, where Winston so casually cast off his own chewed remains. They were still there, only neatly stacked in a pile.
‘You like the new garden, corgis?’ asked security, stepping outside and nursing a mug of coffee in his hand. Then he noticed where we were looking. ‘Don’t worry; we didn’t throw out all your bones. We wouldn’t do that to Her Majesty’s canine representatives. We only got rid of the ones that were cluttering up the garden beds and so forth.’
Margaret and I both turned to look at Winston, who tossed his head with a snort.
‘Hidden in plain sight,’ said he.
CHAPTER 8
There had been signs—not that we had noticed them. Coughing spells that lasted longer than they should have. Too many meals not fully eaten. There were also walks when he remained at home, saying he just wasn’t feeling up to it today. We had thought he was simply having a hard time shaking off the remains of the flu bug that he had picked up over winter. With the benefit of hindsight, we should have worked it out sooner. The simple fact, my fellow subject, was that Winston was gravely ill.
He did try to warn us. But as usual, there was an elusive quality to what he said, so that I didn’t hear what he was trying to tell us. In my own case, that was probably because I didn’t want to listen.
I remember padding over the lawns to the river near Windsor Castle, our progress slower than in the past, when Winston paused near an extravagant spray of crocuses. ‘A spring morning has never seemed as filled with promise as it is today,’ he intoned, his voice tremulous.
I raised my nose and inhaled the sweet fragrance of the meadows. To me, the morning seemed exactly like the day before—and how it would no doubt seem tomorrow and the day after that. ‘It is nice,’ I agreed. But I did wonder why he was making such a big deal of it.
Dozing by the fire a few evenings later, he rolled over towards me from where he had been stretched out to absorb the full warmth of the fire on his tummy. ‘Delightfully toasty!’ he enthused, stretching out his legs.
‘Hmm,’ I agreed, sleepily.
‘Nothing nicer than roasting oneself before the hearth!’ he continued, as if the experience had led to some kind of epiphany.
I blinked open an eye—the one that wasn’t concealed beneath my floppy ear. ‘You seem very . . .’ I searched for the word.
‘Very what?’
‘Very . . . happy with little things. Like a spring morning. Being by the fire.’
‘Appreciation.’
‘Hmm.’
‘And that’s because the little things are the big things, when you don’t know how many of them you have left.’
‘But doesn’t spring come every year?’ I asked, combining naivety with thoughtless ingratitude. ‘Don’t we have a fire every night?’
‘That may be,’ he replied, without a trace of judgement. ‘But do any of us know for sure that we will be around to run through the fields next spring? Or even to sprawl in front of the fire tomorrow night? Life is impermanent, dear boy. Fleeting. None of us knows just how precious it is, until we realise that it will come to an end. Perhaps sooner than we imagine.’
I understood the point that Winston was making. But so gentle was his hinting that I didn’t understand why. A more mature dog would no doubt have worked it out pretty quickly. But I was neither very mature, nor the most observant of corgis.
I took notice when the subject came up again several days later, from one of my favourites in the extended household. Harry, along with William and Kate, had set up the Royal Foundation, which was a charity working in areas of special interest to them. It so happened that Harry had invited a small group of former servicemen to Buckingham Palace. Margaret and I escorted the party—Winston was feeling poorly—as the young prince showed them around the palace, including a number of rooms that most members of the public never get to see. Each of the servicemen had, at some time in the past, been seriously wounded and their lives had changed shape as a result of their wounds. Today’s visit was both a celebration of their survival and the way that several of them had discovered new energy and fresh purpose.
There was Jeff, the former SAS captain now wheelchair-bound, who had taken up basketball as part of his rehabilitation program. He had fast developed such ability for the sport that he had excelled himself at the Invictus Games, before going on to set up innovative training programs for paraplegic athletes throughout the country. In recent months, he had been invited to help train teams in the USA and Europe.
Leighton was a very different character. The quiet, older man had been so shattered after imprisonment and torture in Afghanistan that he had been unable to speak for several months after coming home. Finding his way to a farm in Cornwall, where he didn’t have to interact with anyone except for his immediate family, he had taken up beekeeping as a hobby, after discovering a few unused beehives in the garden shed. He had found unexpected solace spending time in silent communion with his hives of bees. The hobby had evolved as he discovered he had a particular way with the insects, and he was able to harvest honey made from specific plants. In time, his handmade, single-origin, organic honey had come to the attention of one of Britain’s most famous chefs. At this point he and also his bees were suddenly in demand.
It was intriguing listening to former veterans tell their stories. As so often in the past, I felt that Buckingham Palace was the energetic heart of the nation, sending out waves of inspiration and gathering them back again through stories such as these. That quiet but ever-present rhythm of benevolent purpose, embodied by the Queen herself, coursed through unseen channels and out into the broader world. In the telling of stories such as these, the people involved and the inspiration they shared seemed to return home.
But it was while they were sharing coffee in the garden afterwards that I overheard a conversation between Harry and one of his guests and it had a real impact on me.
‘Coming to these sorts of events always makes me feel like a fraud,’ the former serviceman was saying, as I padded up to them. ‘Physically and mentally, I have completely recovered. There is absolutely n
othing wrong with me.’
Harry was nodding.