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Poor darlings, they have never had any fun yet,’ King George VI wrote in his diary shortly after the end of the war in 1945.
By ‘fun’, the King meant the kind of social life he had enjoyed in the 1920s, the non-stop dancing at lavish private balls or to hear Ambrose and his Orchestra at the Embassy Club in Mayfair.
Things had been very different for his daughters, the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, who spent their teenage years in more sombre circumstances, serving the Royal Family and the nation as Britain fought the threat of German occupation.
Perhaps for Elizabeth, this was no great hardship. Unlike her mother, who was the life and soul of parties, and in contrast to her sparkling younger sister, she did not enjoy big social gatherings.