“I remember when King George VI died, coming home and finding my mother in tears,” my mother recalled, shortly after the royal wedding had finished and her own tears had dried up. Her mother’s tears back then had expressed grief; hers on Friday sprang from a tremulous joy mingled with nostalgia.

Growing up in English-speaking South Africa, she and her family — “We were royalists,” she says, smiling — experienced the king’s death and Princess Elizabeth’s elevation to the throne as something personal. They adored the poised young woman who had been thrust, like her father before her, into responsibilities for which she had not been wholly prepared.

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