20 September—Yesterday, as I was weighing my allotment of 97-cents-a-pound red seedless grapes at the Litchfield Stop & Shop, I found myself humming “America.” A neighbor contemplating raspberries observed, “Mordecai, you must have been watching the funeral.”

“What funeral?” I asked. “The Queen’s, of course. That’s why you’re humming ‘God Save the Queen,’ isn’t it?”

“Sorry, I hadn’t even listened to the funeral. And I was humming ‘America,’ though now you mention it, I may have unconsciously been humming ‘God Save the Queen.’ That’s the least I can do for the old girl. But humming doesn’t involve words, so I guess I’ll never know. And now it would have to be ‘God Save the King,’ anyway.”

“That’s right. Say, you lived in England. Did you ever meet the Queen?”

Being scrupulously honest, I had to admit that even though I had lived in the United Kingdom for several years—and almost like a native—to the best of my knowledge, I had never met Her Late Majesty nor any members of her immediate family.

But I didn’t tell my neighbor just how close I came to meeting HM, various HRHs, and other members of the family that had actually taken the name of a prominent piece of its extensive real estate holdings to conceal its German ancestry. It was at two back-yard bashes at Buckingham Palace that I came close but managed to avoid meeting the Windsors.

The Buck House bashes are also known as Buckingham Palace Garden Parties. A few are held every summer to humor the proles, a few thousand of whom are thrilled to be invited to attend each one. They’re catered commercially, of course, since even the royal kitchen staff would be overwhelmed by the crowds.

So how did I get invited? First time, it was on a challenge by two college pals, Australian and Canadian. “Bet ya can’t, Rosie,” the Ozzie provoked me. (He’s the one who had christened me Rosie the Rose because I had a habit of nicking one of the domestic bursar’s little roses for my buttonhole in season.) The Canuck backed him up and added a meal at Studley Priory—an atmospheric hotel and eatery—if I came through. Not that he could afford it.

How could I resist? So what does an American do in such a situation? Easy. I dashed off a letter to my contact at Grosvenor Square—our classy brutalist embassy at the time. A couple of days later, a note from her, “Can do. And it’s for two, but I can’t make it. Sorry.”

The next day, the postman made it a point to personally hand me the invitation from the Lord Chamberlain (yes, kings and queens really have them) and assure me how privileged he was to deliver it. Included with the invitation was a huge parking permit meant to be stuck prominently on your windshield to show everyone how privileged you were.

How to dress for the occasion? For women and ladies, let your imagination run away with you. For men and gentlemen, formal day dress—morning coat, etc.—had been de rigueur. But by the mid-sixties, the invitation specifically said that “lounge suits” (business suits over here) were permissible. So I certainly wasn’t going to hire morning dress like all the men and gentlemen who took it seriously.

(I had in fact hired morning dress to ush at the Canuck’s wedding a couple of years earlier, which had caught me by surprise. And I looked pretty sharp in those days.)

Whom to drag along to the back-yard bash, then? That was easy. Since my Canadian friend was going to treat me (and presumably his wife) to an expensive dinner at Studley Priory (which he couldn’t afford), he was the obvious choice. First, however, I asked his wife; but, much as she, being a full-blooded Brit, would really have loved to go, she genuinely regretted that she couldn’t make it that day.

So her husband and I would go. As a couple! The Sexual Offenses Act, decriminalizing homosexual activity, was at the time working its way through Parliament. Fanbloodytastic!

More to come . . .