Winman, Sarah - When God Was a Rabbit

The bunting was up and the mercury slowly rising, and capes made from Union Jacks rose and fell against the contours of our young backs. It was the last weekend in May. 1977. Our Queen had never been so popular.

The Sex Pistols blared out from the record player that Mrs Penny had held hostage ever since her dramatic arrival at the street party, half an hour before.

She’d cut a towering figure as she’d tottered up the road in an unbuttoned silk shirt that reminded our neighbour Miss Gobb ‘of a pair of jammed curtains. And no one needs to see what’s going on in her living room’.

Mrs Penny stopped at the first trestle table and handed over the box she was carrying.

‘Made it myself,’ she said.

‘You didn’t?’ asked Olive Binsbury nervously.

‘No, I nicked it.’

Silence.

‘Joke. Joke ,’ said Mrs Penny. ‘It’s a Victoria sponge – after the old Queen,’ and everyone laughed. Too loudly. As if they were scared.

She pogoed and spat and flexed her studded fist, and came close to electrocution when her four-inch stiletto heel got caught in the precariously long extension lead that had started to fray at the edge of a mossy wall. Only the quick thinking and even quicker reflexes of my father prevented her cindered demise, when he shoved her gently onto a pile of beanbags and sent the remaining two inches of her skirt up to her exposed waist.

‘Oh, Alfie, you are naughty!’ she shouted as she rolled laughing into the gutter, and as my father tried to help her up, she pulled him down on top of her ripped fishnets and tiny leather skirt, which, Miss Gobb also noted, would have been more useful as a purse. My father stood up and brushed himself down. Tried to rid himself of her perfume, which clung like tired fingers to a cliff face.

‘Let’s try again, shall we?’ he said, as he lifted her to her feet.

‘My hero,’ she said, licking her purple pouting lips.

My father laughed nervously. ‘Didn’t have you down as a royalist, Hayley.’

‘Still waters, Alfie,’ she said, reaching for my father’s arse and finding my mother’s hand instead.

‘Kate, didn’t see you there, love,’ said Mrs Penny.

‘Can you give Greg Harris a hand with traffic patrol?’

‘I’ll give him a hand with something,’ she said, and teetered off to our makeshift barricade that hadn’t as yet got the required police approval, as it temporarily blocked off our road from Woodford Avenue.

Jenny Penny and I were on trestle-table duty, covering them in Union Jack paper tablecloths and placing paper cups and plastic cutlery at ‘sensible’ intervals along the edge. We laid out plates of jam tarts and chocolate rolls and Wagon Wheels, that immediately started to glisten in the rare, balmy sunshine.

‘I wrote to the Queen once,’ said Jenny Penny.

‘What did you write?’

‘Asked if I could live with her.’

‘What did she say?’

‘Said she’d think about it.’

‘Do you think she will?’

‘Can’t see why not.’

A car beeped angrily behind us. We heard Jenny Penny’s mother shout, ‘Oh, fuck off. No I’m not. Go on, back up. You’re not coming through.’

Beep! Beep! Beep!

Jenny Penny looked pale. Someone turned the music up – my mother probably – to drown out the louder expletives.

‘Oh, listen,’ I said, raising my finger heavenwards. ‘This is my favourite.’

Jenny Penny listened. She smiled. ‘Mine too. I know all the words. I’ll start. “I see a little silhouetto of a man. Scary mush, Scary mush, will you do the fandango?” ’

‘You’re not coming through!’ screamed Mrs Penny.

‘ “Thunderbolt and lightning, very very frightening. MEEE!” ’ I sang.

Mr Harris ran towards us. ‘Where’s your dad, Elly?’

‘ “Galileo, Galileo, Galileo.” ’

‘ “Fig Roll!” ’ screamed Jenny Penny.

‘Your father, Elly? Where is he? This is serious. I think there’s going to be a fight.’

‘ “I’m just a poor boy, nobody loves me,”’ I sang.

‘Oh, fuckit,’ said Mr Harris, walking off.

‘And that’s what I think of your cousin in the police!’ shouted Mrs Penny as she exposed her jiggling breasts.

‘Yikes,’ said my father, running past us, rolling up his sleeves. ‘Trou-ble,’ he said in that broken-up, annoying way of his.

‘ “Let him go!” ’ sang Jenny Penny.

‘ “I will not let you go,”’ I sang.

‘It’s just a simple misunderstanding,’ said my father.

‘Let me go!’ shouted Mrs Penny.

‘We can sort this out over a cup of tea,’ said my father calmly.

‘ “I will not let you go!” ’

‘ “Let him—” ’

‘WILL YOU TWO SHUT THE HELL UP NOW!’ screamed Mr Harris, pulling the plug from the record player. He led us by the arm to the dappled shade of the large plane tree.

‘Now sit down and don’t move until I say so,’ he said, wiping away the sweat that had formed under his nose. Jenny Penny moved.

‘Don’t you dare,’ he said before unscrewing his pewter hip flask and downing at least half of its contents. ‘Some of us have duties to perform. Important duties.’

Mr Harris officially opened the party at two o’clock that afternoon, heavily aided by the remaining contents of his hip flask and his sailing horn. He made a rousing speech about the importance of monarchy and how it separates us from the uncivilised world. Especially the Americans. My parents looked down at their feet and said something uncharacteristically rude. He said that queens are necessary to the heritage of our country, which made my brother and Charlie laugh, and said that should the monarchy ever fall, he would hang himself and finish what his first wife had promised.

‘To His Majesty,’ he said, raising his glass and sounding his hooter.

Nancy turned up dressed as Elizabeth the First. She was in disguise because she’d just had a film out and wanted to avoid a photographer who was keen to catch her in a compromising position.

‘Hey, beautiful!’ she said when she saw me.

‘Nancy,’ said Jenny Penny, barging her way through, ‘can I ask you a question?’

‘Course you can, darling.’

‘Is Shirley Bassey a lesbian?’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Nancy, laughing. ‘Why?’

‘Alice Cooper?’

‘No. Definitely not.’

‘What about Vanessa Redgrave?’

‘No.’

‘What about Abba?’

‘Which one?’

‘All of them.’

‘Don’t think so.’

‘So none of them are?’

‘No. Why do you want to know, sugar?’

‘Well, it’s for my school project.’

‘Really?’ said Nancy, looking at me. I shrugged. I hadn’t got a clue what she was going on about. My school project was about pandas and elephants. The theme for us all being Endangered Species.

Night fell heavily. The smell of sugar and sausages and onions and stale perfume hung above the tables, warmed by tealights and chatting breath, and it merged into a giant scent that ebbed and flowed like a spring tide. Cardigans were pulled across shoulders, and neighbours – once insular, once shy – leant upon those same clad shoulders and whispered boozy secrets into disbelieving ears. Nancy helped Joe and Charlie on the drinks table, ladling out the non-alcoholic punch called Silver Jubilee, and the much more popular alcoholic version called Jilver Subilee, and people danced and told jokes, all in celebration of a woman no one had ever met.

And cars were finally admitted and they came beeping horns, this time in solidarity, not annoyance, and they rolled by with hazard lights flashing, adding disco beams to our Motown tunes, and their open windows added laughing, singing voice to already tipsy banter.