The contrast was reflected in their relationships with their parents. Charles gravitated to his mother, who provided him with a sympathetic ear; Anne was close to Philip. Charles sometimes gave the impression of being ‘terrified’ of his father, who had little understanding of his son’s fears and inhibitions and was inclined to laugh at them. He laughed at Anne too, but she could deal with that, cheerfully braving his ridicule, saying anything she wanted to him, and laughing back at him and with him, as she did when they were playing a game involving car number plates.

To keep his children amused on long car journeys, Philip would call out the registrations of passing vehicles and ask them to make a sentence out of the letters. One car had the number plate ‘PMD’.

‘That’s easy,’ Anne said. “Philip’s my dad!” ’

She paints her childhood as an enviable outdoor 1950s lifestyle, surrounded by family and animals. ‘We grew up singing on the way to and from barbecues,’ she recalls. ‘Mostly First World War songs – we have quite a repertoire of those. The Queen is a very competent singer. I think we were very lucky as a family to be able to do so much together. We all appreciated that time.’

The question of education is always an important one for parents, and the Queen and Prince Philip were no different in that compared to anyone else, though their options were obviously constrained by convention and issues of security, as they looked to do what they felt was best for their children. With Charles, because his shyness carried through into his studies, the Queen understood that he was likely to get more embarrassment than encouragement from working as one of a group (looking back today, he is certain that her assessment was right), and she consequently decided that he should have lessons alone when he began his education.

Miss Catherine Peebles, who was promptly named Mispy (from Miss P), set up a schoolroom at Buckingham Palace, but instead of inviting other children to join him in his studies, he was taught on his own. Even Anne was not allowed in when he was working. Miss Peebles discovered that she had to deal with a vague child or, perhaps more accurately, a child who still had only a vague relationship to the external world. He was a ‘plodder’ who was good at art but took rather a long time learning to read, found it hard to concentrate on written subjects, and was incapable of understanding the ‘language’ of mathematics.