THE QUEEN’S SMILE

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume 77, 13 June 1942, Page 2

THE QUEEN’S SMILE

EFFECT ON AMERICAN CORRESPONDENT

The Queen spoke to me to-day. I realise, of course, it shouldn’t affect me this way. I’m emphatically not a British subject. On the contrary. I’m an American correspondent, and American correspondents are supposed to be hardboiled. cynical, and thoroughly sophisticated. Yet it does affect me this way! There’s no use denying it. Outside, it’s been pouring wet and cold and grey all afternoon. But inside I’ve felt radiant and \yarm and sort of bubbly. It hanopned at the Palace—yes, Buckingham Palace. The American colony in London was presenting a dozen or so “food convoy” trucks to take emergency meals to a badly bombed district. ... I was standing on the edge of the little crowd of spectators. Suddenly the Queen noticed me, smiled in recognition, and walking over to where I was, spoke to me and shook hands. Oh yes! I’m quite frankly bragging now. I admit it. I was just "plain proud and thrilled. ’. . . It stayed there throughout the ceremony and for that matter all day. At first. I wondered if I were just ridiculously susceptible. But reassurance came almost at once from a particularly satisfactory quarter. At the end of the ceremony, I was standing next to a really hardboiled American journalist, Mary Welsh, correspondent for those blase organs, “Time” and “Life,” and a woman at that. To my delight, she was as swept- off her feet as I was by the Queen. “Oh. yes.” she said. “It’s true—l can't help it. It’s not only men who feel that way—she does it to women, too. I get that queer, excited, tight feeling in my throat—only of course I couldn’t put it that wav in print, or I’d get fired!” After that I felt better.— (Malory Brown, in the “Christian Science Monitor.”)