With the crown now all but certain to pass to her, her father, from the day he became George VI, started taking his daughter into his confidence, ‘speaking to her as an equal’. By war’s end she was attending council meetings, taking the counsel of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and discussing the affairs of state with her father daily. Given her new status as heir to the throne, Queen Elizabeth enhanced her interest in her daughter’s education and it was on her instigation that she was sent to study constitutional history under Sir Henry Marten, the vice-provost of Eton College just across the river Thames from Windsor.

Yet, for all her maturity, she remained in many ways a child. Her polished manners and grown-up conversation concealed a wealth of inexperience. Throughout her childhood and almost all of her teens, she was dressed in the same clothes as her sister, despite the fact that Margaret was four years her junior. She also shared her nursery classroom with Margaret. She never had to hone her talents on the grindstone of the competition of contemporaries of her own age.

Isolated behind that glass curtain, she enjoyed minimal social life of her own. What little she did have she left it to her mother to organise. It was not until a special Girl Guide troop was formed for her that her circle widened out to include children from beyond her own privileged background. Several Cockney evacuees from the East End joined the royal troop at Windsor and it was ‘no doubt very instructive’, so Crawfie remarked, for Elizabeth to mix with youngsters who did not have a ‘tendency to let them have an advantage, win a game, or be relieved of the more sordid tasks’, as the children of the court had.

Now, said Crawfie, ‘it was each for himself’. The princess was not comfortable in this competitive environment. She liked the security of the safe and simple routine of royal life. Ever since she was a little girl, she had shared her bedroom with Bobo, the Scotswoman twenty-two years her senior who became and remained her closest friend. She found the informal intimacy of a guide camp difficult to deal with. ‘She was getting older, and had been brought up so much alone, I could understand why she did not want to undress before a lot of children all of a sudden, and spend the night with them,’ Crawfie said.

When it came to dealing with boys, she was even more inhibited. Boys of any kind, Crawfie remarked, were strange creatures out of another world to the princess and her young sister. But whereas Margaret was instinctively flirtatious when in the company of the opposite sex, Elizabeth, fundamentally shy, was always much more reserved in their rare company. ‘That unsophisticated air of hers has always been part of her charm,’ her governess remarked.