‘No one was hurt?’ Elizabeth asks and Philip turns to her.

‘Not a scratch on any of us. I can’t say the same about the pilots’ feelings! They must have had a boll— A dressing down,’ he amends, ‘when they got back to base.’

‘You didn’t have such an easy time of it later, I hear,’ her father says.

Philip picks up his knife and fork. ‘No, there were some hairy moments.’

‘Dickie was telling me some story about a raft,’ the King prompts.

‘Oh, that … Just a lucky ruse.’

Elizabeth can see he is trying to shrug off any attempt to cast himself in a heroic light. ‘What happened?’ she asks.

Philip hesitates, but at her father’s urging he tells the story. ‘Wallace was covering the Canadian landings on Sicily,’ he begins. ‘As you can imagine, the Germans weren’t very happy with that, and their Stukas were on us the whole time, so we were at action stations pretty continuously.

‘That particular night, it was still and very bright. A beautiful night at any other time, but the worst possible conditions for us then. The moon lit up our wake and turned it into one long, shimmering trail. We might as well have had a flaming sign pointing towards us for a pilot to follow. A German bomber found us, of course – he could hardly miss us! – and we took a hit to the side of the ship. He took off then, but we knew it was only a matter of time before he came back with reinforcements. At that point we’d be sitting ducks.

‘There was no way of knowing where they would come from. In the dark, they could see us on the water, but we couldn’t see them. It’s like being blindfolded and knowing someone is coming to get you.’

Elizabeth lays down her knife and fork. She is picturing the men silent on the ship, their shoulders hunched in anticipation of the next attack, straining their eyes at the night sky, listening for the sound of aircraft while the sea slaps unperturbed against the hull.

Conversation around the rest of the table has fallen silent and they are all listening to Philip’s story. ‘What did you do?’ the Queen asks.

‘We got the men to knock up a wooden raft,’ Philip goes on. ‘We knew we didn’t have long. It took them a matter of minutes until we could haul it over the side and set fire to it. Then we hightailed it out of there, full steam for a good five minutes before we felt safe enough to cut the engines.’

‘So that the wake subsided?’ The King nods. He was a naval officer in his time, too.

‘Yes, sir. Or we might as well have taken out a sign saying “Look, we’re over here”.’ Philip takes a sip of wine. ‘We lay there in the darkness. I remember the ship rocking gently, and the silence. Nobody said a word. We were all waiting for the Germans to come back. I don’t know how we long waited,’ he says. ‘It felt like hours and hours but it can’t have been. And then we heard the aircraft.’