I WAS queuing for lunch at my East London school when the headmaster walked in and said: “It has just been announced that the King has died.”

It did not mean anything to me and I just carried on getting my food.

Three or four months later, we were all marched up from our school in Stepney to Whitechapel to see the young Queen driving past.

It was my first sight of our new monarch, the lady I would be destined to spend a lifetime photographing.

I was 11 when the Queen came to the throne in February 1952, and for the vast majority of people today, she was the only monarch they had ever known.

They will mourn her passing with great sadness.

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I covered the death of Diana in the summer of 1997 and witnessed scenes the like of which I had never experienced before.

Five years later, I watched queues that lasted for days as thousands upon thousands of people paid their last respects as the Queen Mother lay in state.

But those events will now be eclipsed in the lead-up to the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II.

Like me, millions will feel lucky that she was our Queen.

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I was with her in Scotland in September 2015 on the day she passed her great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria’s record of 63 years and 216 days on the throne.

She said it just meant she had lived a long time. But when you think how she was only 25 when she became Queen, it shows just how brilliantly she did, all with no fuss.

On foreign tours she would hold a reception for the media, and it would always be small talk.

But two months after the Princess of Wales died, we were in India and I could not resist telling her: “Ma’am, your address to the nation about Diana was fantastic. I watched it in a pub in Westminster.”

She said: “You were in a pub?”

Thank you

And I told her how the whole place went quiet listening to her.

Later, as the Queen left, her lady-in-waiting came back and said: “Thank you for saying those lovely things to the Queen.”

It was at that moment that it dawned on me how few people ever told her what a great job she did throughout her long reign.

On another occasion, I asked the Queen: “Why do you keep going to Balmoral on your holidays?”

She said simply: “Well, I like it there. Where else could I go?”

Later, a lady-in-waiting told me how when the Queen went through the gates of her Scottish estate each summer, she kicked off her shoes with delight.

For three months she lived the life of a normal person. Up there people ignored her. Unless she spoke to them, locals carried on with their work and the police protection officers were hidden in boxes round the estate, so she could not see them.

Someone at the American Embassy once told me how the US had wanted a royal visit and were told: “We can send you Charles and Diana.” And the Americans said, “No, no, we want the Queen.”

Then when I got my MBE in 2003, who did I want to present it to me? Charles? William? Anne? No, I was just like everybody else. I wanted the Queen.

I took my first ever photograph of the Queen as she got out of her car with Prince Philip and Edward, who was about 12.

As a photographer, you had to concentrate 100 per cent because the Queen would never do a stunt for an easy photo, like throwing a dart or picking up a billiard cue.

You just had to wait for her to smile. But that amazing smile would light up the whole room.

And she had a great sense of humour. She unveiled a statue of Eric Morecambe in Morecambe, Lancs, in 1999, showing him in his Bring Me Sunshine pose.

The statue made me laugh and I knew the Queen was laughing too, but I did a shot from the back. You did not need to see her face, you knew she was smiling.

The best picture I ever took of her, though, was at the Derby in 2005. Her Majesty was wearing green and her companion, Lady Angela Oswald, clearly told her something funny, because she just roared with laughter.

It was a fantastic sequence of photos that I was never able to beat.

The Queen lived through recessions, wars and personal heartache and every time she bounced back.

But when Prince Philip died, she lost the one person she could confide in, and I am sure the Queen missed him desperately.

When I saw her for the first time all those years ago in East London, she had already pledged to devote her whole life — “whether it be short or long” — to her people.

Travelling the world with her for 40 years, she made me proud that I am British — and so proud that she was our Queen.

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