This is the moment we have all been dreading, when we have finally lost the light of our lives.
The Queen has been with us for so long, and been such a tower of strength and stability, that it felt like the Elizabethan Age would never end. But we knew it had to.
I had joined with everyone else in the fervent hope that she would recover from her illness – and outlive her centenarian mother.
We must remember the good times we have enjoyed under Her Majesty’s seven-decade reign.
I was an eight-year-old boy at All Saints Primary school when her father, King George VI died, and recall little of that sombre occasion.
But I remember well the joy of the Queen’s Coronation in June 1953. Bunting was strung across the houses, there were parties in the street, with food that had just come off the ration.
We didn’t see it on the telly, even thought this was the first time it had been televised, because no one in Railway Terrace had a set.
We saw it on the Pathe News at the cinema. But we knew it was happening.
Stuffed with pop and cake, we sang God Save The Queen until our chests would burst. This was the start of something new, something exciting.
The enthusiasm was infectious.
And it lasted. We went into an era of tumultuous change.
Stalin died, the Korean Conflict, the “forgotten war” was over, a Commonwealth team conquered Mount Everest and England won the Ashes.
Buckingham Palace was barely a stone’s throw from Carnaby Street, capital of Swinging London.
The young Queen seemed to be everywhere on newsreels, launching ships, cutting ribbons, acknowledging the cheers of flag-waving children, and always smiling: that honest smile of benevolence.
The years slipped by like a royal Cinemascope picture (that was new, too): Christmas at Sandring-ham with the family and corgis.
Windsor in the Spring, summer at Balmoral, the family’s favourite retreat in Scotland, autumn at Westminster for the state opening of Parliament.
One by one, the nations of her father’s Empire gained their independence, and Her Majesty presided over a largely-peaceful dissolution of the dominions over which, it was said, the sun never set.Almost from the beginning of her reign, there were family troubles.
In 1955, her sister, Princess Margaret, gave up the love of her life, former equerry Group Captain Peter Townsend, whom she could not marry because he was a divorcee.
I remember the scandal at the time, but there was scarcely a ripple when she married a commoner, photographer Anthony Armstrong Jones, five years later.
They parted in 1977, but the split was overshadowed by the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, as the nation rejoiced.
There was great public sympathy for the Queen’s “annus horribilis” of 1992 (as she called it) when Prince Andrew separated from Sarah, Princess Anne divorced Captain Mark Phillips and Prince Charles separated from Diana – and Windsor Castle went up in flames.
Diana’s death five years later brought fresh anguish but to my mind the greatest triumph of her later years was the first visit of a reigning monarch to the Irish Republic in 2011, and the hugely-symbolic shaking of hands with former IRA commander Martin McGuinness.
Considering that her beloved cousin, Lord “Dicky” Mountbatten, had been killed by a Provisional IRA bomb on his yacht off the Sligo coast in 1979, these iconic gestures must have come at some personal sacrifice but they opened a new chapter in relationships across the Irish Sea.
But that is our Queen: the “anchor of our age” as one United Nations secretary general called her, yet always ready to sail into uncharted waters, with a smile, a wave and the steely determination that gets her through one adversity after another.
It is to her every Christmas that my generation – and the ones following – have looked to the monarch for guidance and reassurance in a troubled world. Amid the celebrations, at home and even in the pub, people fall silent at 3pm to hear her annual address.
That respect was even more pronounced when 24 million people watched her special Covid broadcast on April 5 2020. “Take comfort that while we may have more to endure, better days will return, we will be with our friends again, we will be with our families again,” she told her people.
It is difficult to recall those words without a tear welling up, as those days did return, but not for the Queen.
One year later, on April 9 2021, when the pandemic still raged, Prince Philip, her husband of 73 years died.
Her Majesty confided in private that his death had “left a huge void” in her life, and to many of her subjects, the Queen has never seemed quite the same since.
The almost-shy smile with which she welcomes one Prime Minister after another, even when she can barely stand, never fades, but it is clearly a struggle.
As a young Queen, she promised to give her whole life to the duty she inherited.
Her death behoves us to reflect on the example she has set to the nation and the world.
In virtually a century of public life, from a toddler in the 1920s to the longest-serving head of state in the 21st Century, she has always been there: reliable, responsible, understanding, a right royal blessing.
I cannot imagine what life will be like without her.
This is a family affair. It will be like losing both parents at once.
There will be a void in all our lives, as there was in hers.
