A day later Maudie arrived, as did Ernie. Children and grandchildren took turns filing in and out of the bedroom, Louise telling her mother – who could now no longer see – who it was who was coming and going. At one point the Queen rallied enough to ask that her little dog, Turi, be brought to her, and he was laid on the bed so that she could place her hand on his soft fur and have the comfort of feeling him near her.

The day after Maudie and Ernie’s arrival it was obvious that the end was near, and on her doctor’s advice the bulletin ‘The Queen is slowly sinking’ was issued.

‘I’d like to be with her,’ Willy said to Bertie.

‘You’ll have to wait.’ Bertie was under enormous strain. ‘You had a couple of minutes with her when you arrived, and her Connaught grandchildren haven’t spent time with her yet.’

May was standing nearby and she held her breath, certain Willy was about to erupt in indignation.

He didn’t. Mindful of his grandmother’s impending death, Willy, perhaps for the first time in his life, controlled his temper. Abruptly turning away from Bertie, he saw May and said, through clenched teeth, ‘I’m going for a walk. Are you coming?’

May was only too willing to escape the tension in the crowded house, and ten minutes later she was walking with him across the snow-covered lower terrace.

‘Damned arrogance!’ he erupted, with such rage that the upturned ends of his stiffly waxed moustache trembled. ‘I’m the firstborn grandchild and the favourite! If Grandmama wants anyone at her bedside, it’s me.’

Where arrogance was concerned, Willy took some beating, but May thought what he had said was probably true. No matter how badly he behaved, the Queen always forgave him and reminisced as to how her late beloved Albert had once swung Willy in a napkin when he had been only a few months old.

‘And it is only out of respect to my grandmother that I didn’t publicly take Bertie to task for speaking to me as if he was an uncle talking to a nephew, when although I am his nephew, I am also the Kaiser and an emperor – and he is only the Prince of Wales! It’s my opposition to the Boer War that he can’t stomach. The Boers are Dutch. Why should the republics they founded half a century ago now come under British control, just because they are rich in diamonds and gold?’

May remained silent. It wasn’t up to her to begin defending the Boer War. But as her father-in-law and Willy were going to be fellow emperors, and would then have to see eye-to-eye with each other over world events of great gravity, it seemed to her that her father-in-law should have injected a little more regret into what he had said.