The trail from Amy to Marilyn

"I SUPPOSE I should feel very sorry," I told the mediapersons when they called on me to check on the Palace report about the Royal family's decision that our coat of arms would be "removed", "But I don't think that it matters very much."

For quite sometime it had been making me feel silly whenever I looked up at the coat of arms displayed at our shopfront with the legend, "By appointment to the Prince". I could well recall the times when a tailoring outfit like ours at Saville Row could not ask for anything more than being under appointment to the Royal family. I know that we have a long history as a breed which was despised by Napoleon Bonaparte when he said that ours was a nation of shopkeepers. I also know that the shopkeepers bred a pirate who set fire to an invading armada which called itself Invincible. Shopkeepers who sailed the seas had built up for themselves an empire on which the sun never set for a long time. If the Royal family now obviously thinks that we who have decked them out proudly for over a hundred years don't matter any longer since there are others of our tribe waiting to serve them, so be it. We would not be so badly off as Cardinal Wolsey who moaned centuries ago that he would not be in the sorry predicament he had found himself in his old age had he but served God instead of the King.

The Princes lost their empire half a century ago but ours has grown to become a multinational. I shall always remember how the likes of us had started and are still coming up the same way. I can regale you for hours with stories like that of another Prince - a Nawab - who borrowed from merchants like us and sank under bankruptcy to make history by leaving us a piece of real estate having a magnificent view of the sea in Madras City. If we did not always trust the princes who bought from us and did not pay, we knew that we could always trust the many others who did not have money but would find it and would not keep us waiting for long. I could very well visualise even today how the English writer, Richard Hogarth, as a little boy from the working class, would have shrunk from a sense of shame when he made a small purchase from the shop at the street corner and told the shopkeeper that his mother would pay him tomorrow or the day after. And among the tomorrows was the one which came with the money due to the shop-keeper. And the tomorrows would also see the little boy becoming a great writer.

Our dressing rooms with their halls of mirrors have seen princes draped and they are still doing just as well with the teeming nouveau riche. When I stepped into these rooms as a little boy accompanied by my father, I was not thinking of princes. I could have marched out with battalions of myself if I could have picked them out from those mirrors. But I was not giving any attention to this while I was looking at the stacks of tweeds, terelenes and woollens waiting for their metamorphosis into suits with our tapes, scissors and the sewing machines. When I ran the tape around the necks of princes, patricians and the plebians or dangled it from their shoulders or encircled it around their hips, it was I the tailor who contained them. I could have told the bony, half-starved ones that they were scarecrows. I withheld comments from the athletic ones since I did not want my admiration to go to their heads. The wise man who said that no man is a hero to his valet did not obviously think of the tailor who could strip princes and see what a disgrace they were. I can also tell you that the one who still remains the wisest among men belongs to our tribe as you could readily recall had you read that rollicking story, "The Emperor's Clothes." He could hypnotise the Emperor and almost all the people in his kingdom into believing that he was dazzlingly dressed when he did not have any clothes on. Almost, because there was a little boy who cried out that the king was naked.

I would no doubt miss my princes because of our not being under appointment to the Royal family any more. They had been coming so far in hordes not only as princes living on hopes of reaching the throne which may be light years away from them thanks to the longevity which the one now occupying it could count upon but also their uncles, cousins and nephews. I would miss them because I would no longer see almost every one of them looking very ordinary with nothing to remind me that they belong to that lineage of King Arthur who ruled his kingdom with his knights of the Round Table. The garments which the princes of King Arthur's time wore were truly royal and set them apart from the hoi polloi and would it surprise you if I tell you that I can still make them? I have had orders - and I am still looking forward to getting them - from Hollywood when it turns out the likes of "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court," "Sign of the Cross" and "Ben-Hur." If the tight-fitting breeches I made for them sharply dug into their skin below the knee, that was the price the royalty of yore had paid for having been born as kings, princes or commanders of their armies.

The Hollywood assignments were a big break for me from having to make suits of the same kind which everybody wore. The job began to sit heavily on me as it looked like having to carry out a sartorial grind all the time. I know that a king who was ruling over his empire which was going to crumble within a decade telling his heir apparent that his bejewelled apparel and the crown weighing about ten pounds felt like a tonne apart from making him feel very silly. But I think that kings who might feel self-conscious in their traditional robes and crown in the new century would still look much better than in the dress I have been making for the princes under appointment to the Royal family. Having had a look at today's royalty down the line, I know that many of them for whom I have made my best dresses have faces which you will miss in a crowd. A talented artist who was commissioned by the Royalty to do the portrait of a prince told me about the despair he had felt over having to do with features looking wholly unprincely. He also told me that today's brood from the palaces are more a ragtag and the bobtail who could be drafted only for its crowd scenes by Hollywood, though I thought that this was much too unkind. But that should explain why the princes I have known have fared very badly in romance.

I did not know how much a prince could be despised until the vivacious, brilliant and charming girl told me why she had to break off her engagement with that young man from the Palace. "I just had to run away from him", she said, "because I knew what I would be heading for if we got married. He was always telling me of his yacht which would take us round the world or about his plane which would do the same thing much faster. He was telling me about the endless lunches and dinners which would be waiting for us with their rich menu. He was telling me about the chieftains in the African countries with the colourful feathers stuck on them and the tribal dances they would be participating in. It would be a long ball and we would have joy, we would have fun and seasons in the sun, he said and then I would see him lost in that vision of an eternal sunshine. He then told me about the cocktails and the banquets waiting for us around the world. He could not know that I was feeling appalled. The prospect for me was one of unmitigated drabness and the inanities we would have to get used to. I just had to run away from him." The prince from whom she had disengaged herself was indeed a poor fish but he was heartbroken when she jilted him. I told him he was lucky since he would have been miserable with the Becky Sharp he would have married. Our girls have come a long way, I thought, from the time when Amy Robsart of Sir Walter Scott's Kenilworth was dismayed when Queen Elizabeth I, - Good Queen Bess as she was known - would not believe that she was seduced by one of her noblemen. The Marilyn Monroes who have taken over are sought after by Presidents with aching backs during the era of the Second Queen Bess.

CVG

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