The music of nature is not the only form of music she likes: military bands, popular music from her younger days, singing and playing the piano (which she learnt to do as a child) are all things she enjoys. For the Queen Mother’s ninetieth birthday, she had the inspired idea of making a cassette of Scottish childhood songs with Princess Margaret. Neither of them played, choosing instead to concentrate on the singing, and to get it right asked Laurie Holloway, the renowned composer and pianist, to come to Buckingham Palace to help them create the surprise present. When he arrived at the palace, he was shown into a room containing a piano and two microphones. ‘There was a sound engineer. We recorded each song in one take,’ he recalled. ‘I think there were about a dozen songs. The Queen has a nice, sweet tone to her voice.’

At the Queen’s request, only one cassette tape was made and the only song Holloway could recall from the recording was ‘I Know Where the Flies Go in Winter Time’. ‘They sang to me without accompaniment, and I would then play in their key,’ he remembered. Sadly, after the Queen Mother’s death, the cassette went missing.

‘I don’t think the title was written on the cassette, so it might be stored somewhere and no one will realise its significance,’ says Holloway. Princess Margaret told him that the Queen Mother had really liked the tape – although she had to go into her car to listen to it as she did not own a cassette player. When Prince Charles heard about this, he reminded his grandmother he had given her a sound system which contained a cassette player and all she had to do was pop the cassette in and press the right button. There was no need to go and sit in her car after all!

Another of the Queen’s interests is in military history. As head of the armed forces, the Queen feels it is her duty to know every uniform, how it should be worn and with what – which she does – but few realise she is also fascinated by military history. The Countess of Wessex, who is close to the Queen, shares her fascination and loves listening to her talking about great historical events. The pair are apparently sometimes gone for hours, pouring over ancient documents in the royal archives or books in the library at Windsor Castle.

When Sophie visited some of the battlefields and cemeteries of the First World War in France, she told the Queen all about what she had seen.