KEY POINTS:
At Slough railway station there is a dead dog in a glass case on Platform 5. I say to a man in a pin-striped suit: "Excuse me, would you happen to know why there's a dog in a glass case?"
"Yes," he said, rustling the pages of his Times in an irritated manner, "it was the stationmaster's dog." I laughed so much I snorted. He moved away. Well, really. Who's barking? The one who thinks it's mad to keep a mangy old dog in a glass case on a railway platform or the one who doesn't?
I found out later the dog was called Station Jim, that he was a collector for railway orphans and widows and that he died, suddenly, on November 19, 1896. Small wonder he's a bit manky.
His plaque reads, in part: "He knew a great many amusing tricks ... He would get up and sit in a chair and look quite at home with a pipe in his mouth and cap on his head ... "
He once got on a train to Windsor and when the guards tried to put him on a return train, he wouldn't have it and walked back through Eton. I suppose the Queen would approve, loving dogs as she does, but this is Slough. Shouldn't they have a giant stapler in jelly in a glass case on the platform?
I was at Slough, which is where you change for Windsor, because I'd come up with a hare-brained scheme: to go to Britain to see the Queen.
That took me to all sorts of places with which she is associated, in the hope of getting a glimpse, and Windsor was top of the list.
There I stayed at Dorset House, a little bed and breakfast with hard single beds and hard single pillows; little, hard green velvet chairs nobody would dream of sitting on; old-fashioned radiators and framed scenes of Victorian children frolicking at the seaside. You could not imagine misbehaving at the Dorset, let alone lounging. It is very English although it is owned by a charming Irishwoman, Marie.
Windsor is a likely spot for royal watching. There is the obvious reason of the castle which looms largely over the village, just as a real castle should do, reminding all the little people of their little status.
Ascot is nearby and in town is the Guildhall where Charles and Camilla, and Elton and David got married.
I got a cab to the Savill Garden in Windsor Great Park, started in 1740 when it was just Surrey Bog. In 1986 Her Maj, whose garden this is, sort of, was given a collection of New Zealand natives, so should you be longing for a cabbage tree, you can see one here. It is lovely in autumn. You can shuffle through leaves and sit under an acorn tree and get pinged on the head and watch squirrels. A sign reads: "Well-behaved dogs are welcome in the shop and on the balcony."
There is a schnauzer called Bubbles on the balcony of the shop, in its dog bed because it won't sit on concrete. I don't know what it thought about the shopping.
On the way back from the gardens the taxi driver said, "Do you know Elton John?" Well, not personally. Did I want to see his house? Yes, please. So we went up a long drive and I peered through the high gates at a stone greyhound and waved at the security cameras. The driver said: "He's a gay, you know."
The Windsor guards are in the High St at 11 on different days, according to the month, so do check. Then they march up and into the castle.
To get to the castle just go past the Victoria statue. To get to my B&B, said a friendly policeman on my first day: "If you turn right at French Connection, you'll find Peascod Rd." That is a sentence you'd hear only in modern day Britain.
The castle is opulent state room after opulent room; the Rubens and the Van Dycks; and the portrait of Bridget Holmes is here. She was "a necessary woman" whose responsibilities included the disposal of the chamber pots and who died at the age of 100 having served four reigning monarchs. The painting was probably commissioned by James II.
George V purchased the Hunting Negress clock made in 1790. You pull (well, not you, dear) on the right earring and the time is shown in the eye sockets.
The musket ball that killed Nelson is here, removed after his death by the surgeon on board HMS Victory and made into a pendant locket and presented to Queen Victoria.
Queen Mary's dolls house is here. It has running water, working electricity and two Rolls Royces and two Daimlers in the garage. The architect was Lutyens and the garden designer Gertrude Jekyll. "It's wonderful, I reckon," said the old man who has been guarding it for 20 years.
Had the Queen played with it? "No one's ever played with it!" the guard said. "It was given to her when she was 54!" No wonder the royals are a bit funny.
At the guard changing a little boy said, "Where's the Queen?" "She's very busy," said his mother. He demanded, "Are they good soldiers or bad soldiers?" "Good soldiers," his mother said soothingly. "I want bad soldiers," he said. Then, loudly, "Look! There's a black one!" Well, he was. As black as his (bearskin) hat as people, probably people like Prince Philip, used to say. "Sshh!" said his mother, mortified.
Windsor has eccentric charm by the cobblestones. You can have a posh pistachio chicken korma with people with posh voices; no lager louts here, at the Spice Route but you can't get a pub meal at The Irish Pub at 10 past 7. "We stopped serving meals 10 minutes ago."
Nell Gwynn's house is now Nell Gwynn Chinese Takeaways which must be handy if the Queen gets peckish in the night. There is supposed to be a tunnel leading to the castle so that Nell, King Charles II's mistress, could pop up to see her bloke.
Over the bridge is Eton where the schoolboys in their pin-striped trousers and morning coats and floppy hair run along the cobbles with books under their arms. Weatherill Bros, Eton, makes bespoke tail coats and New and Lingwood polo shirts. "Show your support this summer with George Cross cufflinks and hanks," reads a sign in the window.
I wander back and at the Theatre Royal Windsor I see a poster with a face from a very English past. I'm in search of the Queen but Anthony Andrews might be even better. I'm leaving London a day after Andrews opens here in Somerset Maugham's The Letter. In the poster he wasn't the golden boy of Brideshead Revisited.
When I asked landlady Marie, who calls Camilla "that old trout", about the times she's seen the Queen she said, "She's just a little old lady, love."
The Queen is at the National Portrait Gallery and so are her ancestors. Given that the gallery is, as A.A. Gill writes in The Angry Island, "England's greatest club: offering membership to the worthy and the uplifting, the glorious dead ... This is England's catacomb, England's CV," you'd be mad to miss it. It has a vast collection of portraits of royals.
The most widely used portrait of the Queen is adapted from a painting by Pietro Annigoni and it is not here. The portrait was commissioned by the Worshipful Company of Fishmongers, completed in 1955 and displayed at Fishmongers' Hall, London, an ancient, influential guild and quite a fancy building. But still.
I read this in a lavishly illustrated book called The Queen which is in my room at the lavish Langham Hotel in Regent St.
The Queen is quite a sad book. The Queen, it says, "once turned to her lady-in-waiting and remarked wryly: 'You know, I do work most awfully hard, but mummy has all the charm'."
There is a terrific painting of the Queen with an adoring corgi in a full page ad from The Kennel Club, congratulating its patron on her 80th birthday.
At the gallery, I attached myself to a guided tour of the royal halls because I heard the guide say: "Do you want a bit more royal gossip? This is smutty."
It was: illegitimate children, various perversions, many mistresses. No wonder the current Queen is unshockable. On the mezzanine floor I find her looking happy in a yellow twinset and tweed skirt with a corgi. On her left is Diana's portrait.
The Queen's House is at Greenwich. It was designed in 1616 by the architect Inigo Jones for Anne of Denmark but completed around 1635 for Henrietta Maria, Queen of King Charles I. It is important architecturally: the first consciously classical building in Britain. I asked if the Queen ever came here and a guard said, incredulously: "This Queen? It's not for this Queen!"
Nobody was there and quite a lot of it was closed off, but I was able to look at Turner's The Battle of Trafalgar, alone, which was wonderful. Perhaps nobody wants to visit a plain old white house.
In the Painted Chapel with its grand painted ceiling at the Old Royal Naval College the guide tells me the Queen hasn't been to a service since the Navy left. "She said she never would again."
He says the Navy leaving in 1998 was the best thing that ever happened to the chapel. "They spent all the money on guns and ships. The place was falling to bits."
I went up the hill to the Royal Observatory. An American man came out saying: "You think they'd make more of it." Perhaps he was annoyed by the Great British Queuing System.
You go to a kiosk and queue to get your free ticket from the ticket giver and you then have to wait in line to give to the ticket taker.
The observatory is a bit rickety, which is what it should be. You can read laments about working conditions and rubbish pay and long hours from the astronomer royal. And, in the Meridian courtyard, as Dava Sobel writes in Longitude, "I am standing on the prime meridian of the world, zero degrees longitude, the center of time and space, literally the place where East meets West." How could anyone want anything more?
Greenwich also has the Spanish Galleon Tavern, site of Britain's oldest brewery. Which may or may not be true. I had fish'n'chips and mushy peas for £8 25p ($21) and read a story about a cow with an amputated leg in the Sun. The headline was Heather Moo-Cartney.
Then I read a marvellous story in the Daily Telegraph about a Tory love cheat. This was on my first day in Britain. It was perfect. The leaves in Greenwich Park were just beginning to turn. There were squirrels in the acorns and lovely, watered-down English sunlight. I contemplated buying a 19th century castle tower called Gipsy Tower in Greenwich for £1.5 million.
On my last day in London I went to Hyde Park determined to see the Queen. It was the opening of the New Zealand Memorial to our war dead.
First I went to the Park Brasserie at the Hilton in Piccadilly wanting morning tea. I said this to three people before anyone understood my English.
A girl brought tea. I said: "I wanted Earl Grey." She took it away and brought a bottle of water. She took that away and brought back a teapot and poured tea all over the table. Prince Philip might have had something to say about foreigners.
I went back to Hyde Park and tried to get some high-ups from the NZ military to admit that the Aussie memorial looks like a urinal. Ours is wonderful and I wish I could have seen it at night when the Southern Cross lights up on the top of the granite slabs to show New Zealanders the way home.
The royals arrived and Prince William got a cheer. I couldn't see a thing, let alone a Queen. It was the only cold day in two glorious weeks of autumn. We were handed a copy of Helen Clark's lengthy speech.
I went up to a lovely bobby and said: "Can I get out of here?" "Oh, no, love," he said. "I'm locking you in for hours yet." He was joking.
"Go and stand in the subway, darlin', that'll warm you up. Go down that tunnel."
I turned to go down that tunnel and there she was, the Queen, five paces away from me, inspecting the troops. She looked like a little old lady.
* Michele Hewitson searched for Her Majesty with help from Air New Zealand and Visit Britain. Next week she goes in search of London.
Checklist
Getting There
Air NZ flies daily to London via Los Angeles and Hong Kong. Online fares direct to London start from $2711 per person return. For full terms and conditions visit airnewzealand.co.nz.
Further Information
For information about Britain, including the royal palaces and castles, see www.visitbritain.com.
