His happiness had been destroyed at a stroke and he had hated her for destroying it; hated her for – as she always did – making him feel ridiculous and insignificant. He had sought refuge in his playroom and had stood in front of a mirror, tears scalding his face. ‘I do not look like a monkey! I do not! I do not! I do not!’ he had shouted at his reflection time and again.

When he had shouted himself hoarse, he dragged a scarlet cloak from his dressing-up box and flung it around his shoulders. Then, still wearing the helmet that was part of his uniform, he snatched up a toy sword and, in front of the mirror and uttering war whoops, began swirling it round and round above his head. Suddenly he was a crusader knight storming the walls of Jerusalem to free the city from the infidels; he was Alexander the Great, conquering the known world; he was his grandfather leading the Prussian Army to glorious victory in the Austro-Prussian War of twenty years ago.

And even when, without the cloak, it was time to leave for the parade ground, the sensation that he had aroused in himself remained, for Willy had discovered a precious secret. If he imagined himself to be invincible, then he became invincible.

He hadn’t known at six years old what an inferiority complex was, or why he had one, but he had discovered a way of living with one. He simply pretended to be all the things he wanted to be and wasn’t; and, because he never let the pretence down, the world didn’t know the real Willy – the not-very-brave, not-very-clever Willy. They only saw his steely gaze and his aggressive bearing; his arrogance and swagger and know-it-all superiority. It was a pretence lived so utterly and completely that even his mother no longer knew the true Willy – and Dona had never known him.

It was growing lighter now. The first fingers of dawn stabbed the sky, no longer so pale as to be barely visible, but a pure and piercing deep gold and rose-pink.

With his hands plunged deep in the pockets of his dressing gown – one that had been a gift to him from his grandmother on his last visit to Windsor – he thought about his mother. Even now that he was a grown man, she was still as brutally critical towards him as she had been when he’d been six. The difference now, though, was that he no longer cared.