A little girl wriggled in her buggy clutching a Peppa Pig toy, eager to reach the barrier to add to the bright flowers piling high.
Over and over, oblivious to the teary, smiling eyes moistening around her, she called out “Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye” to a Queen she will barely remember.
Outside Buckingham Palace today thousands came to say farewell, packing around the front gates and the Queen Victoria monument.
Babes in arms, pensioners with crutches, tourists, Londoners, and dogs – lots of them – smart and patient in Union Jack collars and coats. One suspects that Her Majesty would have appreciated those four-legged well-wishers the most.
Out of Green Park tube station mourners snaked to the Palace, clutching lilies, sunflowers and scented roses.
Then without flinching they joined a 30-minute queue up Constitution Hill to place their tributes along the gates, pausing for a moment, chattering softly, taking selfies, reading messages, pointing.
In a beautiful, sloping hand, one card thanked the Queen for “welcoming us to your kingdom and providing comfort and stability to my family during a challenging time”.
In the wobbly letters of three young brothers aged seven, five and two, another expressed sympathy to “the Queen’s family” for the loss of “your mummy and grandma”.
Many more cards simply read “Thank you”, dotted between the tea lights, a pink Care Bear here, a Platinum Jubilee teddy there.
There was even a marmalade sandwich left on the ground to sustain Her Majesty on her final journey, a nod to her adored jubilee sketch with Paddington Bear.
Why had the crowds come? There were so many reasons, often not expressed easily in words.
Imogen Summerville, 29, from London, queued clutching five-month-old son Benji.
She said: “I wanted Benji to be here. The Queen has led an amazing example. We will take a photo of him here, he may not know a Queen again.”
Becs Leaman, 37, came with Evie, two, for the same reason. “I want Evie to know she has been here,” she said.
Decades down the line, two Chelsea Pensioners also queued.
Alan Rutter, 74, met the Queen when he was just 17, during his first year serving in the Army.
“I was in camouflage, I’d been firing mortars,” he recalled. “I had a blackened face and they gave us white gloves to meet her. She didn’t comment! I warmed to her, everybody did, but I was very nervous, she was very beautiful. I feel very sad. People will acknowledge she was our greatest Queen, she was a serving Queen.”
Pola Sian and wife Shaymm came from Bury St Edmunds, in Suffolk, with their three-year-old twins. Pola arrived as a refugee from Iraq 26 years ago. He said: “We wanted to see the Queen, it’s so sad. We felt she welcomed us here, we feel she made it possible for us to be here.”
Determined Jackie Percival, 62, from Clacton, Essex, who recently had a knee replacement, had her flowers strapped to her crutch as she waited. She explained: “What an amazing woman, and I know my parents would have been here. I’m here for them too.”
Others stumbled upon this globally historic event while on holiday and felt compelled to play their part.
“She was a special person,” Lutz Lachnit, from Kassel, Germany, said. “In Germany we have known the Queen since we were children, too. I wonder if Charles will be as popular?”
And some came because they felt somehow always connected to her, simply because they had met or seen her in the flesh. The Queen’s relentless work ethic meant she touched many in person.
Fahmida Ferdous, 37, met the Queen twice, once aged 18 at a university ceremony in Westminster. Then, the monarch shook her hand and Fahmida was “starstruck”.
She said: “I have come on my bike just to pay my respects. I came last night in the rain, too.
“My parents are from Bangladesh. I feel both nationalities, and the Queen embodied being British for me and the spirit of the nation.”
At 1pm, an almost complete hush fell across the sea of people as a gun salute sounded its first cannon fire in Hyde Park.
These salutes were performed by armed forces throughout the nation and overseas, including at the Tower of London and on Royal Navy ships.
So many thunders, 96 in total, each symbolising a year of the Queen’s life.
It went on and on, each hammering home just how long she reigned over us, and had simply, as so many people remarked here, been. Just been.
A presence that you thought would go on and on, as the guns seemed to.
You can leave your tributes to Queen Elizabeth II here
This weekend, the Daily Mirror and Sunday Mirror celebrate the life of Her Majesty the Queen with a commemorative special filled with all the key moments from Britain’s longest reigning monarch. Be sure to pick up your copy of the Daily Mirror and Sunday Mirror to get both pullouts.
