While our nation grieves, it’s the little things that shine through

On Thursday morning I was apple-picking when a friend texted that the Queen’s doctors were concerned for her health. In the parched days of late summer, dozens of windfalls had dropped from the mossy branches of our old Bramley and I was afraid the harvest would be small. But by the evening, when the Queen’s death was announced, I had enough apples for a winter’s worth of pies, crumbles and sauce.

On Friday the flag flew at half mast on the church tower next door, where the bell-ringers rang a half-muffled peal. The branches of our damson trees were heavy with blue-bloomed fruit; I picked as many as I could and left the rest for the birds.

The damson pulp dripped in its jelly bags as I listened to the radio broadcast of the new King Charles III’s address to the nation. On Saturday, the ancient pageantry of the Accession ceremony was punctuated by anxious scrutiny of the sugar thermometer as the jelly seethed in its pan.

Throughout the days since the Queen’s death, there have been many such small collisions between the momentous and the quotidian.

Amid the solemn pageantry and the strangely personal sense of grief felt even by those of us who never met her, it is the everyday details that stand out most poignantly. The young Princess Elizabeth playing tag aboard HMS Vanguard in 1947; Lady Glenconner, one of the Queen’s maids of honour, recalling the Marquess of Cholmondeley making a hash of doing up the press-studs on her linen Coronation robe; a documentary clip in which the Queen rather wistfully remarked that one of the nice things about summers at Balmoral was that she could sleep in her own bed for six weeks.

Queen Mary told the young Princess’s governess, Marion Crawford, that her grand-daughter should study history rather than arithmetic, as she would “never do [her] own household books”. But if Edward VIII had not abdicated, it is easy to imagine the Queen living a life rather like that of the late Debo, Duchess of Devonshire: chatelaine of a great house, a tweed-skirted regular at county shows, selling her own excellent jam in the estate farm shop, on whose books she kept a close eye.

Such a life might have made her happy; but one of the things she relinquished on becoming Queen was the luxury enjoyed by her subjects, of flirting with a range of imaginary destinies to see which might prove the best fit. Still, among the innumerable tributes a hint came from an unexpected source that between official engagements, the Queen might have found time for some modest domestic distractions. The former Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, tweeted, “I enjoyed discussing our families, gardens and jam-making with her.”

In the final pages of his memoir of bereavement, The Madness of Grief, the Rev. Richard Coles describes how, while mourning his partner, David, he saw a crab-apple tree, laden with fruit. He gathered the apples and made “bittersweet preserve”.

As the Proclamation of the Accession of our only lawful and rightful liege lord, Charles III, by the grace of God, was read out in our village church and in churches across the realm, my pots of damson jelly stood on the kitchen worktop, glowing a regal crimson-purple where the light caught them. The bittersweetness of the changing season, sealed in a jar.