Coronation Read Online Free

done, after a suitable moment’s pause to assert dignity and authority and examine the exterior of the registered envelope to his satisfaction.
    With the children watching impatiently and even Granny looking over her spectacles and stretching her neck from her corner, he had slit the envelope and withdrawn the wonderful, miraculous and wholly unexpected blue and gold tickets which he had now been showing around so proudly in the compartment of the Coronation Special.
    At first there had been some moments of confusion as they had gaped at the pasteboards, their twenty-five guinea price mark, the location and the things promised thereon. It seemed that there must have been a mistake of some kind until Clagg noticed that in addition to the five tickets the envelope contained a letter from Bert, which he now unfolded and read aloud:
     
    ‘Dear Cousin Will, here are your tickets. They are not where you wrote, they are better than where you thought because I have had a bit of luck which I am glad to pass along to you. One of the fellows in our company here has a friend who knew someone who works in the same place as a man who has the inside on what was going on with the tickets for the Coronation he said. They are marked down and I could get them because the company selling them was over-stocked and I suppose 25 guineas even here in London is pretty high and they wanted to sell them. Anyway I have got them for you for the fifty quid which is what you wanted to pay like you wrote only if it rains you will be sitting in a window drinking champagne like a toff and letting the world go by. Good luck. I wish I was with you. Sorry you are going back the same day I’d have liked to see the kiddies, give them and Vi my love. Yours Bert.’
     
    Now all was clear at last and the wonder and the glory of it fairly dazzled them. Seats in a window! Row A! Hyde Park Corner! (The location was later checked on a map of the procession route printed in the newspapers and found to be absolutely marvellous.) Breakfast! Buffet lunch! Champagne!!!
    ‘Champagne,’ Violet Clagg whispered to herself and then repeated it out loud: ‘Champagne! I’ve never tasted bubbly.’ And in that moment the two weeks, the very necessary, needed and longed-for two weeks at the Shore View Hotel were wiped from her mind as if a sponge had passed across a chalked slate. It was replaced immediately by a new picture, one plagiarised from scenes from a number of films: the uniformed, dignified-looking butler in the drawing-room holding the napkin-wrapped bottle: ‘More champagne, m’lady?’ Only this time the person holding the thin-stemmed glass waiting for the froth of the high-priced wine to gush into it was not the Countess of Kissmefoot, but Violet Clagg sitting in Row A of the window in Wellington Crescent, Hyde Park Corner. As the Queen went by she would be sipping her first glass of champagne. The years had fallen away from her and suddenly she was like her own children. She had found that bright bit of something that attracts and sells, and every feminine fibre of her was reaching for it.
    Even Granny was impressed and found the excitement infectious, though she would have preferred gin to champagne. She had to get in her nasty remark, of course, saying, ‘If I know Bert the seats will be behind a pillar, or Row A will be the last row instead of the first.’ Yet she grudgingly admitted that with breakfast and lunch being served they would not have to take along any sandwiches or fruit for the children and that would save a lot of bother.
    And so all of them were gathered there now in the compartment of the Coronation Special, the Clagg family basking in the admiration of their fellow travellers, each one cherishing the particular fancy or dream to which the blue and gold tickets would admit them. The wheels sang their dickety-clax, dickety-clax, and with each turn brought them all closer to the manner in which they were to realise them.
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