Smash hit

Some of the younger priests set to after the cathedral closed at 8pm — and proved to be crack shots. Like schoolboys, they leapt about the pews, cassocks flying, snapping off rifle shots at the huge floating condoms. Within an hour every condom had been brought down, some of them exploding loudly. Those taking part, including myself, held an impromptu drinks party during the shootout to celebrate.

Like many large public buildings, the cathedral attracts its share of peculiar visitors. One lady came to confession with a pet duck in a pram, and another would tear off her clothes and run around naked during evening prayer. She was barred after trying to burn me out of a confessional box.

I was sitting inside, hearing confession, when a lighted candle sailed through the open top of the box and landed in my lap. I brushed it to the floor and stamped it out just as another one descended, followed seconds later by a pair of them. One must have landed next door because the lady making her confession suddenly yelled: “We’re under attack here.”

VICTOR FLETCHER was a member of our congregation and a senior member of the “backstairs team” at Buckingham Palace. He had his own small flat up in the top southwest corner of the palace and would often invite me there for large gins and tonic. Every Christmas, he would invite a dozen priests for dinner at the nearby Rubens hotel. Victor had been received into the Catholic Church shortly before we first met. He told me the Queen had been very understanding and said she would remember him in her prayers. She gave him a prayer book to commemorate his reception.

Victor had worked for her father, King George VI, and had known Elizabeth since she was a little girl. He was fiercely loyal to her. But not every royal with whom he came into contact was so popular with him. He told me about the behaviour of a particularly pushy royal couple when staying at Windsor Castle.

The Queen always assigned bedrooms to her guests for the weekend. One suite that was never assigned to guests was affectionately known as the Queen Mother’s Bedroom; even though the Queen Mother lived a few minutes’ drive away at Windsor Royal Lodge, the Queen always kept that suite of rooms free for her, should she ever want to stay.

On this occasion, one royal couple considered the room they had been allocated did not correctly reflect their status. So the wife found one she believed to be more suitable — the Queen Mother’s Bedroom — and moved their luggage in. Victor was speechless. “When I asked her to move the luggage back to the room she had been given, she refused point blank and told me she was staying put,” he said.

He went straight to the Queen, who was preparing for dinner and wearing only a bathrobe. She stormed down the corridors just as she was, marched straight into the Queen Mother’s Bedroom, and, in front of the presumptuous guests, ordered their luggage to be thrown out, whether it was packed or unpacked. With a face like thunder, she ordered the royal couple back to their assigned quarters. “I had never seen her so angry,” said Victor.

Normally people were very respectful towards the Queen, Victor said, but there were exceptions. Not people being deliberately rude, but just being themselves. One such was Ronald Reagan.

When the president and his wife were guests of honour for dinner on the Royal Yacht Britannia, the Queen decided she would serve the coffee, which was most unusual.

“In that situation you would imagine that any guest would take anything she offered,” said Victor. “But when she asked President Reagan if he would like a coffee, she was stunned when he replied, ‘No thanks. Do you have a decaff?’”

“That would have been affront enough, but as someone was dispatched to find a decaffeinated coffee, Reagan reached out a hand and gently patted the Queen on the rump, and said, ‘Thanks for taking care of that.’

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy