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help?”
    “Help whom?”
    “Well” — and the prime minister seemed a trifle embarrassed actually to have to say it — “the people.”
    “Oh, surely,” said the Queen, “it would show, wouldn’t it, that fate is something to which we are all subject.”
    She gazed at the prime minister, smiling helpfully. He looked down at his hands.
    “I’m not sure that is a message the government would feel able to endorse.” The public must not be allowed to think the world could not be managed. That way lay chaos. Or defeat at the polls, which was the same thing.
    “I’m told,” — and now it was his turn to smile helpfully — “that there is some excellent footage of Your Majesty’s visit to South Africa.”
    The Queen sighed and pressed the bell. “We will think about it.”
    The prime minister knew that the audience was over as Norman opened the door and waited. “So this,” thought the prime minister, “is the famous Norman.”
    “Oh, Norman,” said the Queen, “the prime minister doesn’t seem to have read Hardy. Perhaps you could find him one of our old paperbacks on his way out.”
    Slightly to her surprise the Queen did after a fashion get her way, and though she was not curled up on the sofa but seated at her usual table, and though she did not read the Hardy poem (rejected as not ‘forward-looking’), she began her Christmas broadcast with the opening paragraph of A Tak of Two Cities (“It was the best of times. It was the worst of times”) and did it well, too. Choosing not to read from the autocue but from the book itself, she reminded the older ones in her audience (and they were the majority) of the kind of teacher some of them could still remember and who had read to them at school.
    Encouraged by the reception given to her Christmas broadcast she persisted with her notion of reading in public, and late one night, as she closed her book on the Elizabethan Settlement, it occurred to her to ring the Archbishop of Canterbury.
    There was a pause while he turned down the TV.
    “Archbishop. Why do I never read the lesson?”
    “I beg your pardon, ma’am?”
    “In church. Everybody else gets to read and one never does. It’s not laid down, is it? It’s not off-limits?”
    “Not that I’m aware, ma’am.”
    “Good. Well in that case I’m going to start. Leviticus, here I come. Goodnight.”
    The archbishop shook his head and went back to Strictly Come Dancing .
    But thereafter, particularly when she was in Norfolk, and even in Scotland, Her Majesty began to do a regular stint at the lectern. And not merely the lectern. Visiting a Norfolk primary school she sat down on a classroom chair and read a story from Babar to the children. Addressing a City banquet she treated them to a Betjeman poem, impromptu departures from her schedule which enchanted everyone except Sir Kevin, from whom she hadn’t bothered to get clearance.
    Also unscheduled was the conclusion of a tree-planting ceremony. Having lightly dug an oak sapling into the reclaimed earth of a bleak urban farm above the Medway, she rested on the ceremonial spade and recited by heart Philip Larkin’s poem ‘The Trees’, with its final verse:
Yet still the unresting castles thresh
    In fullgrown thickness every May.
    Last year is dead, they seem to say,
    Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
    And as that clear and unmistakable voice carried over the shabby wind-bitten grass it seemed it was not just the huddled municipal party she was addressing but herself too. It was her life she was calling upon, the new beginning hers.
    Still, though reading absorbed her, what the Queen had not expected was the degree to which it drained her of enthusiasm for anything else. It’s true that at the prospect of opening yet another swimming-baths her heart didn’t exactly leap up, but even so, she had never actually resented having to do it. However tedious her obligations had been — visiting this, conferring that — boredom had never come into it.