In the six hours of television that had to be filled between the news of the Queen being comfortable and the Queen being dead, the BBC’s Huw Edwards and Nicholas Witchell often reflected on how nobody could remember a time when she wasn’t there unless they were more than 70 years old. I would put the age limit rather higher: 77 sounds about right. Her father died on 6 February 1952, the day before my seventh birthday. It would be wrong to say that I knew he was king or what a king did. It was his death that made me aware of him.
We lived in Lancashire then. I went to a school, Plodder Lane, where my teacher, Mr Boot, was having trouble making me understand that capital letters began sentences rather than every new line (though they seemed to do that in poetry). Plodder Lane, Mr Boot: Dickensian names such as these support the idea, often mentioned since her death, that the Queen was crowned in a different country. It was.
