Elizabeth doesn’t care. They are all giddy with a sense of liberation. For almost everyone else, it is freedom from war and all the grief and destruction it has brought, but for Elizabeth it is liberation of a different kind. For this one night, she has been allowed to step out of the palace, out of a world where every day is planned with precision and her privileged life is hedged about with convention and duty.

It is as if walking through that gate has unlocked something inside her. Where usually she keeps herself tightly controlled, now she is free to shout, to open her mouth wide and sing, not caring what she sounds like. Her chest expands and she fills her lungs with air, feeling dizzy with the power of it.

‘Run rabbit, run rabbit, run, run, run!’ she sings, yelling along with everyone else. ‘Don’t give the farmer his fun, fun fun!’ She can feel Crawfie’s startled glance. Elizabeth is so quiet normally, so restrained. So guarded. No wonder her governess is puzzled at the change in her.

She will go back to the palace, Elizabeth knows. Her guard will go back up. But for now, for this one incredible night, she wants to let herself go.

Once or twice, she meets a stranger’s eyes and they do a double take, recognising her. Elizabeth just smiles brilliantly and dances on into the crowd.

The streets are jammed with people singing, cheering, banging dustbin lids together, anything to make a noise, as the light fades and searchlights sweep joyfully across the sky above London. Broken chairs and tables are dragged out of bombsites and tossed onto bonfires. The crowd is a living thing, surging up and pausing to warm itself at a fire before circling and swirling on. Elizabeth finds herself at a bonfire and holds her hands out to the flames. She isn’t cold, but the fire has a mythic power to which she cannot help but respond. The city has been dark for six years, and now they are allowed to make light and warmth once more.

It is a carnival where all the rules about being the restrained, polite, stoical British are abandoned. Strangers hug and kiss each other. At first, it is true, Elizabeth stiffens at finding herself clapped on the back or swept against some khaki jacket in an embrace so brief she barely has time to register a face. She is not used to being manhandled. But then, nor is anyone else, she remembers. Theirs is not a society where anyone touches easily. Tonight, though, it is a different world, with different rules. In this world, she is not a princess, just an ordinary young woman celebrating the end of a time of terrible tension.

So she lets her hand be grabbed, lets an intoxicated young soldier pull her into a circle so they can jitterbug. Breathless and laughing, she exchanges caps with a sailor and thinks fleetingly of Philip, but there is no time for sadness, not tonight. Before the sailor’s hat is securely on her head, she is swept into a conga line and singing ‘Roll out the Barrel’ at the top of her voice.