Royal Treatment

(Since I have backup, I can admit it out loud now: I'm reading Tina Brown's The Diana Chronicles. And thoroughly enjoying it. What follows is my recollection of the one moment in my life when I came closest to feeling as if I had a relationship with anything bearing the name "royal." Read on.)

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For a week during the summer of 1999, in the heady early exploratory days of post-college employment, I worked as a temp in the Royal Parks offices in London. My commute to and from the offices involved taking the tube to Marble Arch, and then walking the long diagonal pathway to a building at the center of the Hyde Park, where the Royal Parks offices are housed. The cocoon of the park left the offices in a state of quiet isolation; my lunch break involved sitting on my own at the edge of The Serpentine with a book in my lap, staring at swans.

This may sound idyllic now, but in my early twenties, Hyde Park was not my typical territory: I was a creature who stalked the broad football pitches of Regent's Park, the heights of Primrose Hill, either of them reached easily from the pubs where we drank in Camden, or the wild sprawling staircases of Ally Pally near our home in North London. Hyde Park, just north of Buckingham Palace, was buttoned up, proper. I felt my neck and waist shrinking to Victorian constraints with every step I took down the diagonal walkway.

The job was impossibly boring, and the boredom was compounded by the two supervisors who I'm sure were lovely people, but who must have been horribly frightened of Americans. As soon as they showed me the phone where I would spend my days answering calls from tourists wanting to know park hours, and the typewriter where I would answer letters signed by Lady Jane Double-Barrel about the squirrel problems in her Kensington back garden, they skedaddled back into their offices like hedgehogs into their holes, leaving me at a desk next to a door, on the other side of which sat the men of the Royal Parks Constabulary.

The constables intimidated me, and it wasn't just because of their complex and haughty name. I had more contact with the constables than I did with either of my supervisors, though very little of it was on a professional basis. They often leaned over the desk and looked at me sideways, lobbing teasing jabs at my American accent, asking questions about my boyfriend. I had to call them in on official business a few times, when two Italian tourists had lost their wallets, for instance, and I attempted to assist in the translation. All other interaction was purely based on their need to see how scared they could make me of authority in the course of a week.

As intimidating as their comments were, though, it was relief from the boredom of the job. I had few answers for squirrel problems, and letters about the planned Diana Memorial were passed on to the hedgehogs in the back office. So I suffered their comments in silence, though occasionally I would pretend to make a phone call as soon as I heard the click of the Constabulary door.

One particularly rainy day, I was faced with the prospect of walking back through the park in a torrential downpour. As I stood under the awning at the front of the building, staring contemplatively at my flimsy umbrella, one of the older, quieter constables came out the door and told me to come back inside. He whisked me through the door on the other side of the desk, into the lair of the Royal Parks Constabulary. I had never ventured behind these doors, but I had always pictured a group of men in uniform playing poker and smoking cigars; instead, I saw two constables eating a late lunch, looking up and nodding placidly as we walked through. We passed through stables and equipment rooms, to an official car out back, where I then understood that I was to receive a Royal Parks Constabulary escort down the long diagonal walkway, to be dropped directly in front of Marble Arch station.

We sat together in the car, wipers whisking away the torrents of water streaming down the windshield, intermittent glimpses of the Marble Arch growing closer.

I held my breath.

But the constable didn't tease me about my accent. He didn't ask about my boyfriend, but instead told me about what it was like to work in the park, how long he'd been there, where he grew up. He was kind, and official, as if on command from the Queen herself to insure my safe deposit, dry and unharmed, on the other side of Speaker's Corner.

As I stepped out from the car and into the rain and bid the constable good day, I noticed the confused stares of tourists sitting in Pret A Manger waiting out the rain, watching a Royal Parks Constabulary car emerge from the park to drop a young girl off at the tube station. Suddenly I felt privileged to know the constable, to have the kindness of the Royal Parks at my disposal in return for answering a letter or two involving upper-class rodent problems. It felt nice to be treated with such chivalry. Royal, even.

A few days later, I made excuses to the temp agency and abandoned my Royal Parks post for a swankier job as the receptionist at an architecture and design firm in Clerkenwell. I was placed at the front of the modern open-plan office in an ergonomic chair behind an elaborate array of flowers. Here I would dashingly intercept calls and flourishingly answer letters from top clients on a state-of-the-art 1999 iMac. I would ignore the teasing jabs made by junior architects about my accent and spend my lunch break (on my own) at a boutique eatery called Lunch.

It seemed, to me, so much more glamorous. The top-of-the-line receptionist job.

But royal? Not without my escort.

© Zan McQuade. All rights reserved.