By Two Hours at Her Majesty's Garden Party
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, July 15, 2006; A12
LONDON The queen arrived on time, as one does, to the Buckingham Palace garden party.
At 4 p.m. sharp, Elizabeth II emerged on the West Terrace, a tiny woman in an emerald dress and matching feathered hat, looking as small as a pea before the massive and magnificent sand-colored stone facade. She stood smiling in the blazing sunshine as the Welsh Guards Band played "God Save the Queen," with her husband, Prince Philip, ever at her side, in a gray morning coat with his top hat in hand.
On the lawn that sprawled before her, nearly 8,000 guests gazed up at Her 80-year-old Majesty. The sky overhead was an almost perfect blue, with a few wispy white clouds and cottony jet contrails dissolving slowly in some unfelt wind. It was the kind of summer day when British women have a single, almost primal thought: Hats!
Fluffy ones, flouncy ones, big bouncy saucers and little tangles of color and wire fixed over one ear, like some telephone operator's floral fantasy. Fruit colors, pastels, vivid shades of jellybean, cool country cream and even black. Hats with bows, with arrows, with feathers and lace and straw and bits of wire and plastic and flowers, flowers, flowers.
The men wore suits, some of them morning coats with black tails and striped gray trousers. A good number wore top hats, but some -- including Prince Charles -- simply carried them around like an accessory. Mostly the men left their heads bare to the sun, and they pinked up like the round tips of pork sausages under a broiler.
With the band's last brassy flourish, the queen descended the terrace steps onto her massive back lawn. The Yeomen of the Guard, large men in fireball-red suits holding eight-foot spears with the queen's insignia on their steel blades, accompanied her into the applauding crowd.
The summer garden parties date to the 1860s, the heady days of the Empire, when "God Save the Queen" sounded more like a command than a request. The queen throws three to five of them every year, putting out invitations to various worthies -- small-town officials, lawyers, sports stars. A total of more than 30,000 guests attend, at a cost to taxpayers of about $1 million.
"It's a great honor to see the queen," said John Morris, the mayor of Swale, in northern Kent, who wore a great gold chain around his neck, upon which dangled a gold medallion that weighed at least a pound. The mayoral bauble, which is worth about $42,000, has a ram, horse, doves and other symbols of Kent.
Having shared air with the queen, Morris said it was time for a cup of tea -- palace officials estimate that 8,000 garden party guests consume 27,000 cups of steaming tea in two hours.
"Tea is really very refreshing on a hot day," Morris said.
"They should try it more in America," said his friend, Kathleen Carter.
"If you do that, we'll try your barbecues," said Morris's wife, Ann, referring to the American summer tradition as the "burned food party."
The queen made her way along a path cleared through the crowd, shaking hands. Following protocol as ingrained in the British as the ability to view kidney as a food, no one reached out to the monarch. If she put out a white-gloved hand, and only then, it was accepted and gently shaken.
Ben Hancock, 34, stood at the back of the crowd wearing a tall black top hat made of silk, which was noticeably shiny.
"Guinness," he said. "You wipe it with Guinness to keep it shiny. I bet you didn't know that."
Off on the corner of the lawn, which has its own lake and island, the band played a medley of James Bond themes. To the refrain of "Live and Let Die," the queen chatted with Tim MacAndrews, a London magistrate, and his wife, Helen.
"She's gorgeous. She's so warm and lovely," said Helen MacAndrews, clearly star-struck.
"My heart is absolutely beating faster," she said, still flushed beneath her ostrich-feather hat.
"I need a big drink," her husband said.
One of the Yeomen guarding the queen stood nearby. Someone asked him about his red stockings.
"Yes, I'm wearing stockings, I'm sorry to admit," said the Yeoman, a bear of a man standing about 6-foot-4. "The suspenders kill me. But they're ice hockey ones, not black and lacy."
With that, he marched off behind his monarch, who entered the Royal Tea Tent at precisely 5 p.m.
For nearly an hour, the queen mingled with foreign diplomats in the green-and-white striped tent, where a buffet table was set with sandwiches of poached salmon and chive, egg mayonnaise and watercress and, of course, cucumber. The other guests were left to gawk from a line set up about 50 yards away, where Carolyn Wheeler stood happily in the heat.
"This is part of England," Wheeler said. "For people of our generation, it's the way we've grown up. This is our way of life."
At 5:38, the queen walked across the lawn and moved slowly along a row of guests in wheelchairs.
"I felt nervous and sort of afraid coming here today," said Audrey Lynch, 77. "But on meeting her the fear went away. She just seemed like an ordinary grandmother."
Then at 5:55 p.m., right on schedule, Elizabeth disappeared around the corner of her palace.