When I was a child we lived in a street in Edmonton called Empire Avenue – they don’t give streets names like that any more! It was a quiet suburban street, built just before the Second World War, in which there were no cars, and you still saw horse-drawn vans delivering bread and groceries. Keen gardeners would watch with eagle eyes for horse droppings left in the road, which they would run out and collect in a bucket to put on their roses.

My memories of the coronation are of the vague kind which may be mainly memories of being told about it later. The family story is that on 6 February 1952, my father came home from his job at Post Office Telephones to be greeted by his two and a half year old son with the words (no doubt coached by Mum): “Poor old King’s dead.”

I don’t remember that; but I do have a stronger recollection of Coronation Day itself, on 2 June 1953, when I was almost 4 years old. Like most people, we had no television back then. We did have my 68 year old grandfather living with us, who was dying of smoking related illness, and in fact had only another 4 weeks to live. He had already set his blankets on fire more than once, by continuing to smoke in bed. My mother was not happy. Apart from having him and a small son to look after, she was also 9 months pregnant with my sister Sally.

But a Coronation makes everyone happy, and our neighbour Mrs Haskins, who lived a bit further down the road and did have a television set, was more than willing to share that happiness with her neighbours. In fact, she was obviously eager to do so.

The grown-ups clustered round the box with its tiny black and white image of the scene at Westminster Abbey. The 3-year old boy was bored, bored, bored. What was it that all these grown-ups were so interested in? To keep me occupied, they let me play (carefully!) with the little coronation souvenir model of the State coach and its horses. I was more interested in one of Mrs Haskins’s books: an atlas of the British Isles, with little pictures representing the towns, their buildings and history. That I could have looked at for hours if they had let me. It was much more interesting than the tedium of ancient archbishops placing a crown on a young woman’s head, and all the words that they repeated while they were about it. In later years, when we went to visit Mrs Haskins, I always used to ask if I could look at it again.