Philip was the most attentive of fathers. He had been promoted to the rank of lieutenant-commander in the Royal Navy on the day Anne was born and given command of his own ship, the frigate HMS Magpie, so it was an even more special day for him. He helped choose her names – Anne Elizabeth Alice Louise – and had registered her with the Westminster Food Office. He was presented with the ration book, number MAPM/36, which the little princess, like the rest of the population in the austere post-war years, still required to obtain her allowance of meat, eggs, butter, bread, sugar, milk and, for a growing child, a weekly bottle each of orange juice and cod liver oil.

As we have seen in the previous chapter, Elizabeth and Philip’s royal commitments and his naval career were their main priorities, so that when they toured Canada in 1951, the two young children remained at home. Princess Elizabeth became even more distant as a mother when King George VI died and she became monarch. Godfrey Talbot, the BBC’s court correspondent at the time, recalled: ‘She had been trained since the cradle by her father that duty came before everything, including her family. She reluctantly had to abandon her family and they virtually didn’t see their parents for months on end. It was very upsetting and bewildering for [them].’

In 1953, the new Queen and her consort left on a long-delayed tour of the Commonwealth. They were away for six months. Like her mother before her, Elizabeth cried at the parting. And as her mother had discovered after her six-month trip to Australia in 1927, the long absence had exacted its inevitable toll. When they were eventually reunited, the Queen recalled, her children ‘were terribly polite. I don’t think they really knew who we were.’

In Philip’s case that was even more understandable. He had managed to spend Charles’s first Christmas with his wife and son, but that would prove to be the last time for a few years that they managed to be together for what are usually considered times for family celebration. In 1949, Charles’s mother chose to leave her son at Sandringham with their grandparents and went to join her husband in Malta where he was serving in the Royal Navy.