The Best Time I Got Kicked Out Of A Royal Palace
For talking about sex play at dinner
This article includes several esoteric British terms relating to the British Army, which have been asterisked and defined at the bottom.
If you’re a sucker for strong silent types, imagine sticking one in a uniform and seeing them being saluted by lower ranks. Sweet Blues and Royals*, someone pass me my hand-fan.
The thought of the strong yet gentle embrace of a British Army officer sends thousands of English roses into hormonal overdrive. They attract a particular kind of woman (think: Kate Middleton). Indeed, if you are lucky enough to bag an officer, that’s pretty much who you’re going to base yourself on.
The caliber of the WAGs** is unfairly high. Every one of them looks like a Disney Princess, with swishy hair and a propensity to bake, ensure the house is meticulously tidy, entertain children, keep dogs in order, maintain a fabulous sense of humor 24/7 and orchestrate a house move potentially every two years. Most seem to be doctors or vets or have super high-powered jobs in law of finance. And every one has nerves of steel. Keeping a stiff upper lip for six months while the love of your life (or father of your children) is getting shot at is not a walk in the park.
I’ve been through the rite of passage of dating a British Army officer but the woman described above bears no similarity to me, whatsoever. The moment I realized this was when I overheard one WAG say to another, “The poor sweetheart, six months in Afghanistan!” She cooed, “I’m going to keep checking up on his lovely Mum, of course. He’s going to hate being away from Fido as well. I’m going to send him pictures everyday so he doesn’t miss him.”
My reaction would have been, “The bastard is leaving me BY MYSELF with the bloody dog and no sex for SIX MONTHS while he’s off gallivanting with his mates having an adventure playing with guns. AND I have to visit his MUM. God, some people are *so* selfish.”
I never said I was a good person.
Yet I kept my moment of self-realization to myself. But the moment this tall drink of water realized my failings did eventually come. And he was forced to escort me off the premises of St James’s Palace because of it.
St James’s is the official residence of the Prince of Wales the Duchess of Cornwall and Prince Harry. It’s also home to the officers who do the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace when they’re on duty. For a few days at a time they must sleep in the palace and there’s a strict “No Girls Overnight” policy. To make up for the curtailing of their freedom, the officers may give dinners with all the bells and whistles that come with hosting dinners in a Palace.
It sounds exciting, doesn’t it? Well, it really is, especially if you’re into British military history. It’s tradition for young subalterns*** to regale the guests with the history of the oil paintings and objets d’art in the dining room. But after you’ve heard the story a couple of times, it gets a bit stale, which isn’t an issue if the company is up to scratch. However, while officers of any rank might look dashing, when they’re young, they’re just boys. Some of them come across as if they’ve never even met a girl. Their company is — sorry chaps — remarkably sub-par, to use a term from the dullest sport on earth. On my third or forth invitation to dinner at the Palace, the bloke I was seeing had encouraged his subalterns to invite their friends. Out of a table of fourteen, there were three girls.
It happened within about four minutes of us all sitting down. One young man addressed another one who was seated diagonally across the table from him, at the other end. He had to shout. Let’s call them John and Peter, respectively. Peter, was sitting directly across from me. John reminded Peter of a date that he had gone on. Peter blushed furiously whilst pleading with John not to tell the story. John told the story. And it went like this:
Peter had been on an internet date who had revealed very early on into the evening that she enjoyed being tied up. Youthful curiosity and a high libido got the better of Peter who immediately suggested they go back to hers. They did. The girl requested that she be hog-tied; he acquiesced. But then he went Full-British. He completely lost his nerve and assumed an awkwardness that would make Hugh Grant sound eloquent. He walked straight out of the flat hailed a cab and went home, without so much as a backwards glance.
There were questions. Stuttering Peter fielded them as best he could. Had he done anything sexual with her? No. Kissed? Not even. Shouldn’t he have untied her first? Peter knew that her housemates would be back and could untie her. Had she been in touch since? Of course not.
At the time, I was writing a series of articles about sex and had recently finished one on BDSM, so I found the story pretty fascinating, but I could see that the other girls looked uncomfortable and weren’t laughing. Soon enough, conversation picked up again and we were out of the BDSM woods. Except that we weren’t, because every few minutes John would bring up the hog-tying incident. It very quickly became tedious, and the other girls looked increasingly harrowed. With a dullard to my left and one who might never have spoken to a girl before to my right, I ordered a silver bullet****.
Eventually I had drunk enough to forget my own Britishness. The next time the hog-tying incident came up, I suggested that if the table really wanted to talk about shocking sexual practices, we should venture into the territory of air play and blood play. The table went silent.
“What’s that?” asked one of the braver boys.
I gave a full graphic description of the two. At the end, I went overboard and said that if that wasn’t enough, how about we discuss donkey-fucking, a long practiced cabaret show that was only made illegal in Denmark at the beginning of that year. A grim, uncomfortable silence befell the table once again. You could hear a penny drop.
“I think you’ve had enough,” my soon-to-be ex-boyfriend said, looking at my now-empty silver goblet. “I think it’s your bedtime.”
“Are you kicking me out?” I asked, in a combative, had-definitely-had-too-much, incredulous way.
As I was escorted out passed the Guardsmen tasked with the serious duty of keeping watch over the Royal Family with fixed bayonets, I did what I always do whenever I’m told off; I thought about what I had done. I felt that in the scheme of things this was pretty unfair. I had simply shut down a very boring conversation by shocking the perpetrators out of their selfishness.
On the other hand, I had not asked myself, WWKMD*****? But I knew what she would have done. She would have respected the chain of command. She would have gently leaned over to her other half and suggested that being the most senior rank in the room, they should intervene as the conversation was making the women present uncomfortable. She would have turned to her most boring dinner partner and using genius methods of subversion, quietly educated him on the art of conversation. And she wouldn’t have drunk too much. But I’m not character in a Jane Austen novel, so I didn’t do any of those things.
* A cavalry regiment. It’s second-most senior regiment in the British Army. Prince Harry is (was?) in it.
**Wives and Girlfriends. Obviously it’s frowned to have both a wife AND a girlfriend in the Army, but the acronym of Wife OR Girlfriend is too offensive, even for the British Army.
*** Any rank lower than Captain
****A silver bullet is a very strong cocktail that tastes very strongly of caraway. It’s so disgusting it can only be drunk out of a silver goblet rammed with ice. It will get you raging drunk very quickly.
*****What would Kate Middleton Do?
P.S. In the post-relationship negotiations that every couple goes through, the officer maintained that he kicked me out because I started going on about how the Welsh refuelled German U-boats in WWII. I don’t remember this. But it sounds quite likely.
Florence Walker is a contributor to Petrolicious, an occasional diarist for The Times and the London Evening Standard, and is the former Resident Sex Anthropologist at British GQ. You’ll find her on instragram and twitter as @floxxiewalker
