Grief is price we pay for a Queen who we loved more than we knew , says Christa Ackroyd

In Doncaster they went horse racing. Just as the Queen would have wanted them to.

I don’t know why I was drawn to go to the races last Sunday. I hadn’t planned to. I suppose amid the sadness I wanted to touch base with something which made our Queen happy and apart from her family and her dogs that was her horses.

And so as the Queen’s coffin left Balmoral and it all became so terribly real, in Doncaster racing did her proud too.

A two minutes silence was perfectly observed. Jockeys and trainers wearing black armbands bowed their heads while people clutched their hastily re-designed St Leger programme, now with its black cover showing the Queen cheering on a winner, whilst inside a tribute detailed a connection with the racecourse which went back more than sixty years.

She had her first winner at Doncaster as a Princess. It was where she chose to come back to Yorkshire for the first time as Queen bringing with her her first Prime Minister, Winston Churchill. And where more than twenty years later Willie Carson finally won the oldest classic in the country for her in the year of her Silver Jubilee.

The Queen loved racing and racing loved the Queen, its biggest champion and greatest supporter. And it will be forever etched in my mind that it was at Doncaster racecourse where, for the first time, I sang the national anthem with the words God Save the King.

And no it didn’t feel strange. It gave me back some sense of continuity. A feeling that though everything has changed some things remain the same. And life and the monarchy goes on.

When the Queen was born the world was a different place, especially for women. They couldn’t vote under the age of 30. By the time she took the throne women still couldn’t have a mortgage in their own right. Certain birth control could only be offered by doctors once they had seen a marriage certificate . And if women wanted to buy a telly to watch the Coronation . ... as five hundred thousand households did... they couldn’t take out hp ( higher purchase ) without their husband’s permission.

The Queen could hardly be see as a revolutionary feminist, but she knew her worth as a woman at the helm. Quietly and with determination she was to unpick some of the more archaic rules surrounding the monarchy.

As a young Princess she argued that she should be allowed to join the war effort, becoming the first woman in Royal history to join the armed forces when she donned overalls, drove trucks and worked as a mechanic for the Auxiliary Territorial services.

When she married she refused to take her husband’s name leaving her beloved Philip to bemoan the fact he was the only man in the country not allowed to give his name to his own children. Our new King was the first Royal heir whose birth wasn’t witnessed by either the Prime Minister nor The Home Secretary. Her children were the first to be educated outside the palaces and in schools. Small changes for a Queen and her family but she was to preside over others that were more far reaching.

As the head of the Church of England she was to see female priests and divorced women able to marry in church.

But she also attended multi faith services saying she served people of all faiths as well as people with none.

In keeping with 21st century Britain she was to alter the rules surrounding succession to allow girls to have equal access to the throne. More importantly she showed the world that a woman could be head of the firm, albeit a Royal one, with the same stamina, intellect and work ethic as any man. She was a woman of tradition in the midst of a changing world yet she embraced those changes. She was, in short, remarkable.

When my mum died, also in her nineties, I found neatly folded in the bottom of a blanket box a beautifully preserved souvenir of the Coronation.

I was reminded then and now of the influence the Queen had on her, and therefore on us. Christmas Day was celebrated once the best china, with its Royal warrant beneath ,had been washed and put away in order we could sit down at 3pm to watch her share her family news with ours.

My Mum had her hair set in rollers in the same style as the Queen. She tied silk patterned head scarves under her chin to protect her one little luxury. She wore tweed skirts, sensible shoes and a string of pearls atop the regulation twin set.

She went to dinner dances in long dresses made at home from sparkly material that bore a striking resemblance to those worn by Her Majesty. And she went to Scotland with my father every year for their holidays. Like Her late Majesty she was a good woman and I have thought of her a lot this week with a smile, but also with sadness.

She and the Queen will both be in my thoughts on Monday as we watch a funeral like no other we have seen before.

It is what we do when a monarch dies. Or is crowned. And we do it so well, to the envy of the entire world. Because like the Queen, in our busy modern lives, tradition is still important to us. It’s what makes Britain British. And yet, when you strip away the solemn pomp, the sense of witnessing history, it is still a funeral not just for a Queen but for a dear mama. And that is always one of the saddest times in your life, be it King or commoner.

The death of the Queen has affected us all in ways we could never have predicted. Most of us have cried, often not knowing why. I suspect it quite simply brought back for many of us the emotion of losing a mother and indeed a whole generation who could remember life before her.

But then as Her Majesty the Queen once said, grief is the price you pay for love. And as the nation has shown this week we loved our Queen. Perhaps more than we ever knew.