I tuned in to the royal wedding in time for the bit where the couple stood on that oddly Speerian balcony at Buck House and snogged for the tourists. I’m not so stuck for titillation that the kiss itself held my attention, but rather had pulled up my chair for an appearance by the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight.
I’ve been exiled from Albion’s shores lo these 22 years now. After the first decade or so away, during which I barely thought of the place from one month to the next, I began to construct a new and detailed view of Britain using mostly the thousands of random pieces I had gathered in the course of an unusually long childhood.
Whenever I’m back there – I still call it “going home” – it’s hard to see what has changed. As soon as I return to this side of the pond, however, the differences between Britain today and the country I grew up in become clear again, as the perspective of distance and history works its magic.
Queen Elizabeth has certainly seen those planes on a few occasions by now. The first time around they were brand new, and represented the state of the art back when Britain was a world center of aviation technology. She was a teenager, and the two fighters were being used daily for their designed purpose – chasing and destroying the planes of the enemy. One corner of the palace had been reduced to a heap of rubble by Elizabeth’s ancestors the Germans, who every night sent London an endless stream of dolphin-shaped bombers with evil Benz engines installed upside-down for greater efficiency.
Both the Spitfire and the Hurricane have the same Rolls-Royce Merlin engine, a huge V-12 that makes a very distinctive baritone booming sound. As the war progressed and the threat of invasion receded, it became Britain’s turn to pound cities from the air. As vast fleets of American bombers were leaving at dawn to bomb by day, the British obligingly shifted their operations to nighttime, with the Avro Lancaster heading the field. It’s powered aloft by four Merlins, whose voices have a slight choral dissonance. You can hear it coming and know what it is without looking.
Prince Charles, who was also on the balcony on Friday, bears more than a slight resemblance to his grandfather. King George the Sixth chose to stay in London throughout the war, even when invasion seemed imminent, and as an RAF veteran wore on his uniform the same embroidered wings sported last week by Prince William. The victory celebrations in 1945 featured the flypast to end them all, and the massed Merlins blasted the impudent microphones that sought to capture their mighty hymn.
Exactly fifty years later, almost to the day, I sat in a deck chair in my parents’ garden, surrounded by old friends. It was the afternoon of my wedding, and an extraordinary run of weather had turned Britain into a living postcard of a remembered youth, all shadows and warm scents. And suddenly there it was; faint down the wind, but unmistakable. My college metalwork teacher was there and heard it too, and so did my father, who had learned the song as an engine-obsessed boy during the war. Sure enough, the deep, hollow note grew and swelled until a single Spitfire streaked by no more than a mile away. No-one else raised their heads, but we three had savored that rare melody.
The Memorial Flight serves to keep alive the Merlin’s song, a voice undimmed by age that sings of a land in thrall to engineering, an industry at the peak of its creativity and power and the sense of purpose war brings to a society. Right behind them on Friday came their modern-day equivalents, sleek jet fighters flown by computers and built through partnerships with our former enemies that were forged to face the new perils – first the monolithic Soviets, and now who knows what beyond a rag-bag of terrorists, failed basket-case states and nebulous emerging threats. A thousand times more complex, potent and expensive than the three old warriors that led them through, the jets nevertheless sang of nothing, their voices a dull, bland roar.
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