KING CHARLES III Royal lears & missing Mummy

In an old-fashioned world of restraint and formality, young King Charles craved his mother's affection and suffered at school, reveals Ingrid Seward in her new biography, My Mother and I.

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King Charles III was a shy child and still suffers when meeting large numbers of people, but he is courteous. He never passes a footman in a palace corridor or a stranger while walking in the countryside without acknowledgement, whatever his mood. While others of a lesser social standing might ignore the staff – he loathes the word “servants” – he is meticulous about saying thank you.

Charles is more like his mother than he would admit. The late Queen was painfully shy, and never comfortable with strangers, but she was very gentle and always listened to what they had to say. When she’d had enough, she would say “Reaaaally” as a signal to her ladies-in-waiting to move her on.

The Queen’s former press secretary, the late, enigmatic Martin Charteris who started working for her when she was Princess Elizabeth, noted, “The Queen is not good at showing affection. She’d always be doing her duty.” Charteris worked at Buckingham Palace for over 20 years and claimed the Queen really had very little to do with Charles. “He’d have an hour after tea with Mummy when she was in the country, but somehow even those contacts were lacking in warmth. His father would be rather grumpy, about almost anything. And neither of them was there very much.”

It was a terribly old-fashioned, upper-class upbringing. In his 1994 biography of the Prince, Jonathan Dimbleby paints an unhappy picture of Charles and his mother, saying the Prince bitterly recalled a childhood during which the nursery staff, not his “emotionally reserved” parents, were the people “who taught him to play, witnessed his first steps, punished and rewarded him, helped him put his first thoughts into words”.