A letter from Balmoral for Redmaids' High Juniors

This week, the girls at Redmaids High Junior School received a letter from someone very special. Someone the girls wrote to only three months ago, telling her all about the Bake-Off Cupcake Competition they had held to celebrate her Platinum Jubilee.

Mrs. Brown had planned to share it with our pupils, joyously, in this morning's assembly. Now, the letter from Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, written on her behalf by her Lady-in-Waiting Elizabeth Leeming, is a poignant and tangible symbol of what the country has just lost.

For many of our girls, the death of Queen Elizabeth II will be their first encounter of death. In these strange days of national loss and uncertainty, the girls will see a multitude of press images expressing global grief. But it will be this letter from Her Majesty, dated just three days before she died, that will bring home to the girls the reality of this moment in history.

The letter states: "Her Majesty greatly appreciated you taking the time to send her the photographs of your splendid Jubilee cupcakes." The girls' fun-filled cakes speak to us all about Queen Elizabeth II: the crown of monarchy, the colours of Britain and the Commonwealth, the continuation of history through the Tudor Rose, and the Corgi. Today, this is how we will remember her.