The Queen Mother, by contrast, was gentle and welcoming. She remembered her grandson as ‘a very gentle boy with a very kind heart, which I think is the essence of everything’. The feeling was reciprocated. On her eightieth birthday, Charles said: ‘Ever since I can remember, my grandmother has been the most wonderful example of fun, laughter, infinite security and, above all else, exquisite taste. For me, she has always been one of those extraordinarily rare people whose touch can turn everything into gold – whether it be putting people at their ease, turning something dull into something amusing, bringing happiness and comfort to people in her presence, or making any house she lives in a unique haven of cosiness and character.’

Charles and Anne’s other grandmother was Philip’s mother, Princess Alice, who had now founded a nursing order of Greek Orthodox nuns and wore a nun’s habit (which did not inhibit her chain-smoking consumption of noxious untipped Greek cigarettes or strong, caffeine-loaded coffee or her taste for sherry). She made occasional visits to England from her retreat in Greece and took delight in Charles’s company, though he found her a rather alarming figure.

‘She was very severe,’ Eileen Parker remembered. ‘She always sat bolt upright and had an almost overpowering personality. The room filled with smoke when she was around.’ She spoke broken English in a thick, guttural accent and, because of her deafness, she was hard to make conversation with. ‘She had to be near you so that she could look at you and lip read what you were saying,’ Mrs Parker remembered. ‘The Queen Mother was completely different. Very natural; she had the gift of putting you at your ease and making you feel as if you were the only person in the room.’

One thing Charles did share with his father was an interest in cooking and what went on in the palace kitchens and he was forever popping in to help the chefs weigh out the ingredients, fetching the pots, to give warning when the saucepans and kettles were coming to the boil. Not all his culinary efforts were successful, however. He was once sent to the palace storeroom by a chef named Aubrey – and dropped the tray loaded with butter, baking powder, two dozen eggs and sultanas on the floor on the way back. Not surprisingly, his presence did not always meet with the approval of the kitchen staff, who would complain that he got in the way.

His attempts at making ice lollies were equally fraught. Mabel Anderson kept turning up the temperature of the nursery fridge because his sibling’s milk was getting too cold. Charles kept turning it down again because his lollies wouldn’t freeze. Whether it was the milk or the lollies that came out right depended on who had last been at the fridge.