The late Queen Elizabeth had a heartwarming response to her lady in waiting after her dad was assassinated by the IRA.

Lady Pamela Hicks was a family friend of the Royal Family, but her own family was hit by tragedy when her father Lord Mountbatten - Prince Philip's uncle - was blown up by a bomb in August 1979.

On the way to the funeral, Lady Pamela - who is now 95 - revealed what the late Queen told her. She told the Telegraph Weekend: "The Queen sent for me to come to her compartment at the front of the train and said: 'Now tell me everything that happened.'

"She adored my father. She needed to know. The only way to live through the bomb was to talk about it.

"Any new person who hadn't been bored about it already, I would talk it out to them." Lady Pamela - also known as Lady P - was also a bridesmaid to the Queen at her wedding to Philip in 1947. The Queen and Lady P were also third cousins.

She said of the late monarch: "She was absolutely rigid in her dedication to duty."

Lady P also said she was 'jealous' of the Queen's Coronation dress because "it had a bigger cabin that I did" on the six-month long Coronation tour in 1953 and 1954.

The former lady in waiting said: "It's instinctive to try and be neat. To be appropriate."

This led her the mourn the Queen for a month when she died in 2022, despite the fact she was mostly at home in the Grove in Brightwell Baldwin, Oxfordshire.

She also told how the Queen hilariously fooled tourists that were looking for her on a trip to Australia.

In the 2021 ITV programme, My Years With The Queen, Lady Pamela shared memories of various trips with the young Elizabeth. Reading from the diaries she kept, Lady Pamela painted a fascinating picture of the young Queen, with the weight of duty on her shoulders, but full of mischief, too.

Reading from her diary, Lady Pamela shared one funny story from a trip to Australia which had been particularly long and gruelling. She said: "I sat with Lilibet under a tree, listening to her holding forth about being marooned on a desert island.

“But she cheered up considerably, when a boatload of trippers appeared shouting whether we had seen the Queen, where is she?

“Lillibet, in slacks, tore down to the beach, pointed to the other side of the island and yelled: ‘She went that-a-way!’ and jumped up and down with joy as the boat disappeared around the corner.”