On April 21^st 1926, with the best doctors in attendance, a baby girl was born in the Mayfair townhouse of the Earl and Countess of Strathmore and Kinghorne. The birth of Elizabeth Alexandra Mary was announced that day on a silent Pathe newsreel, predicting that she would one day be Queen.

Five days earlier, without any medical attention, Beryl Mary Perry was born in an outside lavatory in a terraced house in Cardiff, due to my grandmother mistaking birth pains for constipation. My grandmother had married very quietly in a register office, in order to keep her job as seamstress, since married women were not supposed to keep working. When she was pregnant with her first child she had been obliged to leave and the family lost her miserable income. Two weeks after my mother’s birth, my grandfather, a Cardiff docker, was out in the General Strike.