Sunday 11 November
Sandringham Estate, Norfolk, England

A very crisp frosty morning but one of those ones where you don’t mind the cold, because the day that ensues is a glorious bright blue-skied sunny one. At least until 4.30pm that is, by which time it is pitch black again, with nightfall coming very early in this part of the world at this time of year. But a crisp frosty morning isn’t really a problem when it’s Remembrance Sunday – because of course the events of the day are centred around 11am, rather than dawn as those of us from the Antipodes are more accustomed to when it’s Anzac Day. And as we’d missed Anzac Day this year (oddly, it hadn’t seemed to attract much attention where we were at the time, in Jaipur in India), we wanted to make an effort to mark Remembrance Sunday instead. Also, this year the date was a bit special because the second Sunday in November, which is when Remembrance Sunday falls, coincided with Armistice Day itself – the next time that will happen will be 2018, the 100th Anniversary of the end of World War One.

Unfortunately, Pauline wasn’t feeling 100% and decided to stay in the camper-van, so I left her behind and set out from our campsite a bit after 10am, to walk the two miles or so to the “big house”. By the way, there may be a lot more references to distances in yards and miles for the next while, as we’ve had to change GPS Karen to the old Imperial system of measurement, rather than metrics, as it’s just too hard in the UK to always be mentally converting the metric instructions (“after 800 metres, take the exit….”) and match them up against the corresponding road signs (“King’s Heath 1/2m”). And speaking of Karen, she came up with a beauty today as we drove across country from Norfolk towards Oxfordshire, by telling us to take the road to a place apparently called “Pe Turb Yer Oh”……we know it as “Peterborough”. And whilst I’m doing a Roly Scott-style digression on the thinnest of threads away from the main story, I saw an extremely precise road sign yesterday, informing me that there was a Give Way in 142 yards. Not 150, not even 140, not 100 or 200, but exactly 142 yards!

Anyway, back to what I was telling you. The “big house” is Sandringham House, the country house of the Royal Family, who have been coming here for holidays – especially at Christmas – since it was purchased in 1862 for £220,000 as a country home for the then Prince of Wales, later to become King Edward VII. The house is surrounded by 7,000 acres of gardens, forest, farm and parklands, including, in one corner near the B1439, a Caravan Club campsite. So when we say, from now on, that we stayed for a couple of nights at the Queen’s place, we won’t be entirely wrong, will we?

The place is really quite enchanting – the walk at first was along a woodland path where birds and squirrels were abundant, and a one stage on the path, I even saw a pheasant that has been smart enough, so far, not to be caught in the Duke of Edinburgh’s gunsights. Then, after a while, the path joins a lane which passes by two identical but mirror image gate lodges, one on either side of one of the entrances into the main part of the property. A bit further along, the lane becomes a road which leads to Park House which is signposted as “a unique hotel for people with disabilities” now run by the Leonard Cheshire organisation, but which was some 50 or so years ago the family home of the Spencer Family, and is therefore where the young Lady Diana Spencer spent her childhood. Across the road lies the visitor centre and associated tearooms and shop, adjacent to the only visitor gate into Sandringham itself. Sadly, because it is the off-season and also because preparations are now underway to ready the place for Her Majesty’s arrival for the holidays, the place has been closed to the public since the end of October.

Closure of the public gates unfortunately meant that access to the little Church was also unavailable, although of course it also meant there was no service there anyway. So, instead of perhaps joining a small congregation in the 16th Century Church of St Mary Magdalene and commemorating the day that way, I stood on my own nearby, beside the Estate’s own War Memorial. This is a simple stone cross, unveiled in 1919 by King George V, which lists the names of all those from the Sandringham area who died in WW1, many of them workers from the Estate itself. The amazing thing for me, was that as I looked up after my own private two minutes’ silence at 11am, I realised that everything had come to a halt around the immediate area…..there was a group of cyclists who’d dismounted behind me, a woman had silently stopped a few feet away from the Memorial as well, and across the road, all the cafe patrons who had been sitting outside on the terrace were standing, silently and respectfully. As I looked around as the two minutes ended, everyone just simply got on with what they had been doing, and life returned to normal….the cyclists continued their ride, the woman beside me smiled and walked away, the people at the cafe sat down and continued their drinks, and all across the park, people on the pathways resumed their walks. It was as good as being in a large crowd at a dawn service back home – a similar display of respect and commemoration, but in a completely spontaneous way.

After that, I took a slightly longer walk home than I’d planned due to missing the side gate leading back to camp, then we spent the rest of the day inside watching the iPad screen….firstly to see the BBC’s Internet feed of the All Blacks vs Scotland from Murrayfield, then to watch a movie we’d been recommended by a number of you, “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel”. And apart from the fact it was a very pleasant movie to watch, it also provides a neat wrap up to this story…..those of you who’ve seen it will remember that it is set in Jaipur, which of course is where we didn’t mark Anzac Day this year!