Fionnuala O Connor: Last coronation happened in a different world

Dignified President Higgins will be serene regardless next Saturday in Westminster Abbey. Many in Ireland might tune in nonetheless to study the body language of Michael D and two Sinn Féiners while people around them swear ‘true allegiance to your majesty’. Michelle O’Neill and Alex Maskey can hardly nip out for that bit.

Poise will be maintained. It's another demonstration of SF confidence that in the run-up to an election they announced their presence as respect for unionists, believing their supporters like them being better behaved than unionists and will bite their lips. But did the president, and SF, know that swearing allegiance would be out loud? To Charles and his ‘heirs and successors according to law’?

Few northerners now alive can remember how northern nationalists, teachers and civil servants, had to swear allegiance, loyalty. The last coronation happened in a different world. Northern Ireland's unionists may still largely support the monarchy but British polls show respect fading amid strikes and food banks. The Guardian focuses on the king's enormous wealth.

Here's a straw poll. Contemporaries of roughly similar backgrounds and level of education have been friends for 50 years, and yet an event that has a small but fond place in the minds of two of them means nothing at all to the third.

Two of them were eight and 10 then, in different parts of Belfast. They share a vague nostalgia for a cream-painted tin box with a picture of the new queen on the lid. They used the tin later as a pencil-case; the first either had ever had.

Everyone in their schools got one. The younger is fairly sure there was a bar of Five Boys chocolate inside, the other said it was such a novelty to get a present he only remembered the tin. Neither wondered whether the ‘other’ schools – of which they were dimly aware – were marking this faraway shindig.

To tease the third friend, one cheekily supposed that in 1953 in south Armagh there was no call for a tin with a queen on it. The six-year old girl is sure her school, on an unapproved road in Clonalig, got no such thing. (Eamon Phoenix could have told us.)

The older boy, a film buff already, became a walking encyclopaedia on popular culture. The coronation made the charts. Dickie Valentine sang (and he sings it now) 'In a golden coach there's a heart of gold, Riding through old London town.' What he remembered and the other one at first didn't was that on Coronation Day Tenzing and Hillary reached the summit of Everest.

And the person who won hearts on the day by waving with such vigour to the crowds turned out to be the bountiful Queen of Tonga. The forgetful one said later he thought they delayed the Everest announcement to not steal the new queen's limelight.

Few they knew had television sets. Their whole schools were brought to the nearest cinemas to see ‘A Queen is crowned’. Big year for a cinephile: young children 'John and Julie’ running away to see the queen (with an Eddie Calvert theme tune), Marlon Brando later in Julius Caesar.

"An ice-cream seller came round, we called him 'Slap The Tin' – he’d bang the lid of a biscuit tin to get you out. He had a son helped him, went to my school, I remember asking him 'Which did you like best, the Coronation or Everest?' He said 'I wouldn't like to say'. He meant the coronation was boring but it would have been disloyal to say that. I thought it too."

There was a golden coach, though, in the window of a sweetie shop on the Lisburn Road. "Oh I wanted it. I was told I could not have it, only ruder than that."

This weekend a daughter of the six-year-old and eight-year-old is fleeing ceremonious London. It’ll be lovely to see her.