I spent ten days at Saint George’s House in Windsor Castle five years ago. It was a time filled with a sense of history, a sense of beauty, and a sense of wonder at how someone could live their entire life in public gaze.

Saint George’s Chapel, the cathedral-sized place of worship in the castle with its own bishop as dean,  is a place steeped in history, tracing itself back to the 13th Century; it is filled with the graves of English monarchs. One morning, I stood at the grave of Edward IV of England, 1442-1483. I didn’t suppose there were many who now grieve Edward’s passing.

But not far from Edward’s grave was the grave of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth and their daughter Princess Margaret, there were plenty of people left to grieve their loss. At the time, I wondered if the Queen of England, who was then over 80, stood at the grave of her parents and sister and remembered happier times. I wondered if there was a moment for saying a few words and for shedding a tear, I wondered if she was ever given space and peace and quiet?

I don’t understand the relationship of the English with the Royal Family, on the one hand they declare themselves avid supporters of the monarchy; on the other hand, they seize upon every piece of gossip and rumour carried by the tabloid press. If people did not read such stories, the press would very quickly cease to run them, yet the slightest story sparks flurries of excitement on the front pages and on the television and radio news. Does the Queen ever have recourse to the press complaints body, or the broadcasting standards authorities, over the stories that are distortions and the others that are simply lies?

It is confusing, if you respect someone, then you respect their right to privacy and their right to having their own inner life; you can’t claim to respect someone if you splash every piece of tittle tattle all over the newspapers.

To have remained in office for sixty years must have demanded incredible powers of perseverance. If I had been in the Queen’s place, I would have called it a day a long time ago. I would have taken my family money and told the State that they could take what was theirs and I would have gone to live in Paris, where they at least have respect for style.

Sixty years, it’s some achievement.

Glastonbury was the centre of the world when I was a child; the stories with which we grew up made it the most important place in Britain. It was the place where in ancient times those feet had walked upon England’s pleasant pastures green. It was a place where saints lay resting. It was the place of Arthur. It was a place that resonated with hope of a different and a better world.

The Arthurian stories promised heroes who would again ride forth and right all wrongs. Layamon’s Brut from c.1200, concludes with the death of Arthur and his being carried to Avalon – the isle of Avalon for anyone from Somerset could only be in one place, Glastonbury.

“And Arthur himself wounded with a broad slaughter-spear; fifteen dreadful wounds he had; in the least one might thrust two gloves! Then was there no more remained in the fight, of two hundred thousand men that there lay hewed in pieces, except Arthur the king alone, and two of his knights.

Arthur was wounded wondrously much. There came to him a lad, who was of his kindred; he was Cador’s son, the Earl of Cornwall; Constantine the lad hight, he was dear to the king. Arthur looked on him, where he lay on the ground, and said these words, with sorrowful heart: “Constantine, thou art welcome; thou wert Cador’s son. I give thee here my kingdom, and defend thou my Britons ever in thy life, and maintain them all the laws that have stood in my days, and all the good laws that in Uther’s days stood. And I will fare to Avalun, to the fairest of all maidens, to Argante the queen, an elf most fair, and she shall make my wounds all sound; make me all whole with healing draughts. And afterwards I will come again to my kingdom, and dwell with the Britons with mickle joy.

Even with the words there approached from the sea that was a short boat, floating with the waves; and two women therein, wondrously formed; and they took Arthur anon, and bare him quickly, and laid him softly down, and forth they gan depart.

Then was it accomplished that Merlin whilom said, that mickle care should be of Arthur’s departure. The Britons believe yet that he is alive, and dwelleth in Avalun with the fairest of all elves; and the Britons ever yet expect when Arthur shall return”.

Legendary history had the power to fire the imagination. Glastonbury Tor was visible from my bedroom window; its lofty presence above the surrounding moors barred the possibility of it being ignored. Generations of people would have looked at that hill and recalled stories told and retold.  Arthur, the Arthur of Avalon not the figure of the film directors, dies when our capacity to imagine ceases. In another generation, will the legends still be told?

We first went there in 1972 – and then for five years in a row from 1975 onward. Each visit was to leave its own impressions.

In 1972, the memory was of  The Malibu and its jukebox, which was probably the first I had seen. 1975 saw a fourteen year old drinking lager and blackcurrant, one of the foulest concoctions ever devised. By 1977, entertainment was being sought further afield, James Bond was being screened  in Bideford. In 1978, there was a day trip to Tintagel, amidst the traffic of a Cornish summer. 1979 was the last visit, the only memory that lingers is of catching a bus from Barnstaple to Taunton on the day of the Mountbatten murder and the Warrenpoint massacre.

The definitive Westward Ho! holiday was in 1976. Camping can be miserable, but that August it was perfect. Sitting out under afternoon blue skies, playing games on the vast beach, listening to music in the beer garden at nights; there could be nowhere better. Skin cancer had not arrived among us and tans were deep and dark; suntan lotion was something used by people who flew off to Costas on holidays far beyond our pockets. Only on the journey home did the weather break and the drought end with a cloudburst.

The seaside village had never been more than a cluster of streets, a string of caravan and campsites, and extensive grasslands leading down to the beach. In the three decades since the last family holiday, virtually all that remained in the memory has disappeared – the beach, the pebble ridge and the cricket pitch seemed all that was recognizable.

Perhaps it is progress. Progress rarely pleases anyone and someone who has not been near the place in thirty-odd years can hardly have grounds for complaint, but development has been uncoordinated and without a trace of sympathy for the Victorian origins of the resort. Would it have been so hard to have had sensitivity to the character of the village, character that took our family there for holidays in six years out of eight?

Nostalgia is never what it used to be. Sometimes there are places that can evoke the delight they did on visiting them years previously; more often, it seems, the disappointment of a lost past is only compounded by the reality of a found present.

Somewhere near Swansea, Emily became agitated. Our junction for leaving the motorway was still miles away, close to Cardiff, and there was no need for Emily to be making her presence known. She became more insistent, advising us that we should be turning left imminently. Having time in hand, we decided to risk Emily’s directions (she can be quite eccentric at times, once taking us from the southside of Dublin to the city centre on a zig-zag route through the suburbs).

The road took us northwards and then eastwards across the heads of the Welsh valleys. Progressing towards our Herefordshire destination, we passed signs for Rhonnda Cynon Taf and then Blaenau-Gwent. We were in that part of Wales of which an English Conservative Party MP once commented that they did not count the Labour votes, they weighed them.

South Wales was a mythical place in childhood days – a land of male voice choirs and magical rugby players and mellifluous place names. There was a moment in the early 70s when Llanelli rugby club scored a major victory, defeating the All Blacks 9-3. There were memories of Max Boyce, standing in his raincoat, wearing a rosette holding a giant leek, singing songs that would echo around the Arms Park. This was the land of mines and steel and the devout making their way to plain stone chapels on Sunday mornings.

What would the giants of the past have made of the current times? Were Dylan Thomas writing in the 21st Century, where we would have found his inspiration? Might there still be a Llareggub to inspire lines on dreams and sub-consciousness? Might there still be communities where people still lived in such closeness?

Emily would not have understood memories, would never have known the thrill of JPR Williams flying up the field, ball in hand; and her pronunciation of Welsh placenames was definitely dodgy, but her re-routing of our journey brought a moment of great reverie.

Margaret Thatcher was a revolutionary. Her revolution was not amongst the middle classes; any Tory leader might have commanded those votes.  Margaret Thatcher’s success was to garner the votes of millions of working-class people, particularly around London and the south-east.  ’Essex man’, the brash, Sun-reading, proletarian, was at the backbone of the Thatcherite revolution.

Growing up on tales of Clement Attlee and Aneurin Bevan, there seemed much to be cherished in the post-war consensus that was accepted by the Conservative governments of the 1950s and 1960s. The consensus sought a society where there would be care for everyone. It was a mood that arose from the  trauma of war and the misery of the 1930s. The English, for it was they who would send Margaret Thatcher Downing Street in 1979, had been determined that they were never going back to the old ways.

Margaret Thatcher was ideologically opposed to that post-war consensus, declaring to Woman’s Own magazine in 1987,

‘I think we’ve been through a period where too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it’s the government’s job to cope with it. ‘I have a problem, I’ll get a grant.’ ‘I’m homeless, the government must house me.’ They’re casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It’s our duty to look after ourselves and then, also to look after our neighbour.’

Being told to look after oneself seems reasonable to those who could do so, particularly if that self-dependence came with extra cash in one’s pocket.  It was a message that struck a chord with many working class electors who had been heavily burdened by the taxation policies of the Wilson and Callaghan Labour governments; it was a message that won elections for the Conservatives in 1979 and 1987 (the Falklands War enabling Thatcher to overcome the unpopularity of 1981 and triumph in the 1983 election). But it was also a message that absolved people of responsibility for others, it removed their responsibility to contribute to those things in society that could not be provided by the market.

Margaret Thatcher’s mistake, (like the mistake of Labour governments that allowed particular trade unions to shape government policy to favour their own members), was to underestimate self-interest.  People who looked after themselves were not inclined to look after their neighbour.  The neo-liberalism of her economic policies was reflected in a laissez faire attitude to society and many people who had not the capacity to cope were abandoned.

Margaret Thatcher’s principle was that one should pay for what one wanted.  It is a principle that might be applied at a societal level, one gets the sort of society for which one is prepared to pay.  Building a consensus-based, inclusive society can only come if there is taxation to pay for it.  As long as that principle is rejected, Mrs Thatcher has won the argument.

At the end of the First World War, Liberal Prime Minister Lloyd George, anxious to retain power at the head of a National Government, threw in his lot with the Conservatives, splitting his party but retaining the premiership in a coalition.  In the previous, pre-war General Election, the Liberal Party had won 272 seats against 271 for the Conservatives; in 1918 Lloyd George’s Coalition Liberals won just 127 seats, while 36 more were won by Liberals opposed to the Coalition  – a net loss of more than a hundred Liberal seats.  By contrast, the National Conservatives, led by Andrew Bonar Law won 332 seats with a further 47 seats being won by Tories opposed to the Coalition.  From a pre-war situation of parity, the Liberals slipped to one of huge numerical inferiority; a decline from which they have never recovered.

By 1922, there was increasing disquiet within Tory ranks about involvement in the Lloyd-George led Coalition Government.  The combined Tory Parliamentary strength was 313 members in the Coalition and 65 opposed; Lloyd George’s Coalition Liberals were down to 120 seats, with a further 35 non-coalition Liberals in the House.  On 19th October 1922, Conservative MPs met at the Carlton Club to debate their support for Lloyd George.  The vote against the Coalition continuing was 187-87.  Andrew Bonar Law was invited to form a government and immediately went to the country.

In the General Election of November 1922, the Conservatives, now united, won 344 seats, the Liberals, still divided won 115, the former opponents of the Coalition gaining 62 while Lloyd George was reduced to having a parliamentary bloc of just 53 seats.  There were to be elections in the two subsequent years, the Liberals staged a minor comeback in 1923, when the Conservatives won 258 seats, Labour 191, and the reunited Liberal Party 158.  However, a year later, the end of Liberal politics was complete; on 29th October 1924, the Conservatives won 412 seats, Labour 151 and the Liberals a mere 40.  Through subsequent elections the Liberal Party remained a peripheral party, even the collapse of the Labour Party in 1931 did not allow a Liberal revival.  By 1945, they were reduced to twelve seats and slipped into single figures in the 1950s and 1960s.

Perhaps the decline was inevitable, perhaps the rise of the Labour Party in the 1920s left no room for the Liberal Party, but their long decline dates from involvement in a Coalition government.

Liberal leader Nick Clegg will know every detail of the ministry of the last Liberal Prime Minister; he will know that the majority party in government bided its time until the point arose where it was able to destroy its partner.   While watching the development of the crisis in European economics, he is likely to keep an eye open to the prospect of being pushed off the bus by a Tory prime minister under pressure from the backbench 1922 Committee.

What was always  baffling was what happened to that world. Of course, the Great War intervened and Britain was never to recover from the battering it received; but what happened to that Edwardian spirit?  What happened to those whose lives were filled with colour and elegance prior to 1914?  The monarch was unchanged; wealth remained in the same hands; the war took a heavy toll, but there were still enough characters to provide inspiration for Waugh and Wodehouse.  What happened to the hopes which greeted the Armistice of 11th November 1918?

David Lloyd George had promised ‘homes fit for heroes’, but along with most of the other post-war aspirations, the promise was to remain unfulfilled.  The Spanish influenza epidemic of the winter of 1918 and the privations brought by an economy exhausted by the war effort aggravated the pain brought by the mass slaughter.  Something had died in 1914 and no Armistice celebration or post-war reconstruction plans were going to resuscitate a spirit that belonged to another age.

The strange death encompassed more than just Liberal England, it changed the national temperament.  Confidence in the future was gone; the belief in some immutable law of human progress lay buried in the mud of the Somme. The history tutor might have explained these things to us in clearer terms, it would have made more comprehensible the years that followed 1918; it would have explained why the autumn gold of Edwardian times could never be recaptured, why the 1920s and 1930s were to be bleak decades.

11th November 1918 marked the emergence of a new reality, it forced the confrontation with the grim facts of a world where innocence had been forever lost. The 93rd anniversary of that morning in Europe is lived in a world that never rediscovered the spirit of those days of Liberal England.  If 1914 marked its dying, then the conclusion of hostilities marked the recognition of its death.

Sometimes, I wish history were more a matter of intrigue and mystery, at least in a novel you can rewrite the story.

JL Carr’s novella A Month in the Country occupies the same post-Great War period. Mr Keach, the prickly vicar might have enjoyed the incumbency at Downton Abbey, he knew not to be overly religious.  He confronts Tom Birkin, the narrator of the story.  It is the summer of 1920 and Birkin’s mind is filled with the hideous images of the Western Front, images that have driven out any last vestiges of traditional religion.  But perhaps it was not just the Great War that destroyed the church in England, perhaps the English with a tradition of rationalism and free thought, had little time for traditional religion.  Keach certainly thinks so:

The English are not a deeply religious people. Even many of those who attend divine service do so from habit. Their acceptance of the sacrament is perfunctory: I have yet to meet the man whose hair rose at the nape of his neck because he was about to taste the blood of his dying Lord. Even when they visit their church in large numbers, at Harvest Thanksgiving or the Christmas Midnight Mass, it is no more than a pagan salute to the passing seasons. They do not need me. I come in useful at baptisms, weddings, funerals. Chiefly funerals – they employ me as a removal contractor to see them safely flitted into their last house.’ He laughed bitterly.

‘But I am embarrassing you, Mr Birkin,’ he said. ‘You too have no need for me. You have come back from a place where you have seen things beyond belief, things which you cannot talk of yet can’t forget, but things which are at the heart of religion. Even so, when I have approached you during your stay here, you have agreed that it is very pleasant weather for this time of year, you have nodded your head and said that your work is progressing well and that you are quite comfortable in the loft. And you have hoped that I shall go away.’

Perhaps it was not such a bad thing to be a vicar in such circumstances.  Tom Birkin had the good fortune to live in a country where he could discuss the weather and wait for the moment when the priest would move on.  The English propensity not to be religious had created a society where people assumed freedom to make their own decisions; where clerical power was diminished by a general air of indifference to ecclesiastical authority.

An unreligious society is one where faith needs to become something considered and serious if it is to endure, it is one where faith comes not as part of the culture, but as a thoughtful personal response.  An unreligious society is one where church becomes something chosen, not something imposed.  An unreligious society would not be such a bad future for Ireland.

It was not just the fact that it was original and from a far bygone age, it was the date of the timetable that inspired trains of thoughts: November 1939.  As Europe went into a tailspin into a hellish darkness and Britain was left alone by May 1940, there was not much reassurance in the world, not much that continued undamaged by the shadow of the evil of National Socialism.

Standing in the shop, questions went through the mind: what had the owner of that copy of Bradshaw’s thought as he turned through its pages in the summer of 1940?  As everything else crumbled away, did the train service remain one of few constant things?  Did the ability to catch the 7.53 to work each morning remain one of the few bright and hopeful things amongst an avalanche of bad news?

Who bought their own copy of Bradshaw’s in those days?  What business was transacted through the journeys planned in those neat pencil figures?

A whole range of characters ran through the mind in the speculation on what the owner may have been like, but the most likely seemed a middle aged man, the younger men having gone away as part of the war effort.  A man, perhaps with a moustache and dark spectacles, sat at a table under the dim light of a gas lamp, perusing the tiny figures in the columns of the timetables.  What world did he imagine as he sat there, relying on dirty steam locomotives to give his world some order?

Published at 2/6, the bookshop was asking for £40 the Bradshaw’s – it seemed too much and I put it back on the shelf.  On reflection, £40 was only half the price of a ticket for a rugby international at Lansdowne Road, and the book would have given hours of reading and imagining.

Going into Keeble’s Bookshop in Langport on Monday, I asked if there might be a Bradshaw’s in stock. There wasn’t, but what I did find was a copy of S.N. Pike’s ‘Mile by Mile on Britain’s Railways’, an account of every mile on the mainline railways of 1947, reprinted at £12.99.  It is excellent. All that is now required to make the magic complete is a copy of Bradshaw’s to know the times of the trains on those railways.

The fourth division was the Bristol Channel coast of Somerset; It ran from Weston-Super-Mare down to the shores along the north of Exmoor. It was a place for a day trip, or, if time was tight, an evening out. Memories of Brean Down seem always to include chips dowsed in vinegar. Travelling across Bridgwater bay, the area became one of interest to naturalists and geologists.  The shoreline at Kilve was a place to be visited, but it was a mistake to visit on Good Friday 1980 and arrive at a pub in search of lunch fifteen minutes before the 2 pm closing time.

A step up took us to Dorset, which offered a string of options in a short space.  West Bay and West Bexington provided places to cast fishing lines deep into the waters. Lyme Regis was for holidays, the details of which remain as fresh as forty years ago. Weymouth was for the village outing on the first Monday of the school holidays; it was called the ‘Sunday School outing’, but the connection with Sunday School seemed tenuous at best. Poole, with its vast harbour, was associated with visits to a grandmother’s friend who served tea with sugar lumps in wrappers that bore the names of local hotels.

Devon was in the second division.  The south coast was an undiscovered country, apart from days out from school to Teignmouth and the towns of Torbay. Holidays meant the north coast and the vast beach at Westward Ho! There were beach games and walks and afternoons spent watching the local cricket team and evenings drinking shandy outside pubs and trips to Appledore and Bideford and Barnstaple and Ilfracombe.

Unparalleled, and rarely reached, Cornwall was top of the league. Even its placenames spoke of magical places; its lanes offered the constant promise of places hidden and beautiful.  Going to Saint Ives in 1973 remains the highlight of those years.  It had not then the aura of sophistication it later acquired, but even four decades ago was a place apart. Goonhilly Down captured the imagination as a set from science fiction movie.

The odd thing is that the seaside became so important.  It was not that we lived far from the sea, the Bristol Channel was no more than fifteen miles, but that the journey to the coast seemed a transport to a different world.  Living on the east coast of Ireland from 1986 until last year, it never occurred how much the sea would be missed when moving inland. Even now the taste of vinegar on chips evokes the taste of sea salt on the lips and the sound of the wind through the rigging of a dozen moored boats.