British and foreign testified by flowers, small words or their simple presence, Friday, at the gates of Buckingham Palace, in London, or of the Château de Balmoral, in Scotland, their affection for the Queen, disappeared the day before.
by, and
The queen left a rainy day and the country woke up orphan. Friday, September 9, the sky still throws its sudden showers over the thousands of people who came to pay tribute to their sovereign, ahead of Buckingham Palace. Nothing can discourage them from being there, on foot, in a stroller, in a wheelchair, a bouquet in hand, a word on the heart.
A whole people come to thank Elizabeth II, who disappeared the day before at 96 years after seventy years of reign, and still speaks of it in the present. The whole world also seems to have met in front of the gates of the palace, where the flowers are piling up. British or not, everyone is aware of a unique moment-immortalized with great reinforcement of selfies.
“Have you come from Far?” (“Do you come from afar?”). This ritual question of the Sovereign of the Commonwealth still makes Kathrin Kelly, 79, an American from New York installed in England since 1965. “The Queen was the story. The pillar of her people,” says Dorina Verdini , a 57 -year -old Italian, accompanied by her niece. Two Canadians wrote on their wreath of sunflowers “Queen e! Thank you for your service.”; One of them, Sam Denstedt, cannot have cried when he learned of the death of the monarch whose face he sees every day on his currency. “Elizabeth II represented the stability of the world”, breathes the young lawyer.
Regina, a German whose parents are the age of the disappeared, underlines the role of the one who was still only a young princess during the Second World War. “A rock. She held her United Nation.” Grace Gothard, a Ghanaian from London, dressed in a beautiful African fabric dress and the shoulders covered with the Union Jack, brought a life -size queen cut into cardboard. She made three hours of cock to lay her flowers and holds with a firm hand the sign that explains her gesture: “I came here in the name of the Commonwealth to say thank you, Madame.”
“Ambiance Soised “
A curious atmosphere bathes the immense place. It is not so much the sadness that dominates, that the desire to find yourself without knowing yourself, to block after the disappearance of a symbol, to share a page of history. The shock of the announcement of the death has passed.
Elisabeth II had become so frail that everyone was measuring their vulnerability. Christine Wrate, 78, immediately noticed, with her old nurse’s eye, the great dark spot on the hand of the sovereign when she shakes the hand of the new Prime Minister, Liz Truss, on September 6. His daughter, Jany Jones, 45, a nurse too, prefers to insist on “the strength” which the queen has shown all her life. Harriett, 16, third generation of this Southampton family knows everything about the “royals”: she watered her mother and grandmother with information during the four hours of the car trip. They suddenly decided after lunch to join the capital.
You have 77.08% of this article to read. The continuation is reserved for subscribers.