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Premonitions bring with them a sense of powerlessness and guilt – what can be the point of even half knowing something about which one seems able to do nothing? At some level I felt
responsible for Ann’s death, a thought too awful for me to tell anyone.

In the early 1930s my Somervell grandparents moved from Bedford Gardens, to a small Gothic villa in St John’s Wood. It was much lighter, and had a larger drawing room
with more space for the piano. There were three bedrooms on the first floor – one for Grannia, one for Mo’s study and a tiny third room in which he slept. On the top floor were two
small attics in which grandchildren used to stay and one was papered like the sky, with clouds. Each time we stayed we were given a paper seagull to stick wherever we pleased on the sky. Often I
used go to spend the day with them, allowed by then to travel on buses on my own.

I was growing older, but my grandfather seemed to be getting smaller and even gentler. I have fleeting recollections of him standing with Victorian dignity on concert platforms after
performances of his work with various conductors and singers, who towered and slouched beside his small figure. His voice was still furry and sometimes squeaky, but there seemed to be less of it.
One Easter holidays when I was thirteen, I was going to stay in Westmorland, and went to say goodbye to him.

He was in bed. ‘He is just rather tired,’ they said. He was sitting up wearing pyjamas, widely striped in blue and white, like breakfast cups. On the bed was a tray covered with his
ties, which he was sorting and neatly rolling into separate coils. For the first time I felt oddly constrained with him and, for want of anything better to say, asked him what he was doing with
them.

‘I like to leave everything tidy.’

‘Why? Are you going away?’

He looked at me for a moment, and he wasn’t my ancient beloved grandfather, but simply somebody who was tired and very sad and I didn’t know which had come first. I kissed him, and
the sweetbriar smell was there for the last time.

We came back from our holiday because he was dying. The doors of his study and tiny bedroom were left open and people came to play to him: Ernest Lush, because he was so good at sight-reading,
and several times a very beautiful young girl with high cheekbones, enormous eyes and a Russian accent who played Brahms and Chopin. I used to sit on the stairs and listen to her. This was Nina
Milkina, who later became a great friend.

These long days went by, my grandmother creaking slowly about, leaning on her rubber-tipped stick, the servants in the kitchen speaking in hushed voices while they prepared trays of food for the
family who came and went.

He died as gently as he had lived; slipped out unassumingly, as softly as a candle, and left us in the dark.

He was the first person to die whom I’d known well and loved and I mourn him still. I knew that for my mother it was a terrible loss. He was the parent who’d truly loved her and,
given her reclusive and isolated nature, she must have felt utter grief. But neither her feelings about him nor mine were ever exchanged. She talked to me of it only in dramatic clichés,
which I hated and was unable to respond to. They took his ashes back to Grasmere where he had been born, but I was only told this after they’d done it.

It took some years for me to recognize that I would not get from my mother what I wanted – the kind of uncritical affection that transcends everyday mishaps, arguments or
wrong-doing on my part. Now, I think that she made efforts to love me, but she couldn’t do anything without criticism, and I suspect she experienced it herself from
her
mother. I felt
constantly on trial: her approval had to be earned and I wasn’t much good at earning it. A niece told me
recently that my mother had once told her that she didn’t
really like little girls – ‘Of course I don’t mean you, Claire,’ she had added. From my earliest years, I was a disappointment to her. My shortcomings were magnified by her
disapproval; my anxiety about doing the wrong thing accelerated the likelihood.

The only times that were enjoyably
Angst
-free at home were when she read aloud to me while I was sewing. She was a very good reader; as Dr Manette in
A Tale of Two Cities
is asked
his name I can still hear her replying, in a ghostly, faraway voice, ‘One hundred and five North Tower.’ But I never felt I could confide in her – since any confidence would be a
kind of exposure that could only count against me. I could never tell her how horrible my day at school had been, or how afraid I was when she made me ride bareback and jump fences with folded
arms, or how I was terrified of putting my head under water, or how frightfully sick I felt in cars, or how embarrassed and ugly I felt when she made me go to parties in bottle-green silk with
bronze stockings and kid shoes to match. There was an ethos then that parents didn’t openly admire or extol their children’s behaviour and talent, and my mother certainly subscribed to
that.

There were other, more serious fears I dared not tell her, or indeed anyone. The worst one was the possibility of another war. Ever since I’d seen the photograph on my father’s
dressing-table and had been told that all his friends had been killed, I’d become steadily more and more terrified by the prospect of war. Nothing that people said about this was in the least
reassuring. Miss Cobham described the Great War as the war to end all wars. But almost at once, war broke out all over the world – in China, in Spain, in Abyssinia. My father had a book
called
Vainglory
in his bookcase, an anthology of his war, and reading it confirmed my worst fears. In the next war we’d all be bombed or gassed to death. Even if anyone survived, the
world would be a dreadful place. My being taken to see the film
The War of the Worlds
exacerbated this horror. The combination of H. G. Wells and Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony
made a deep, unbearable impression on me, and for years afterwards I couldn’t hear that music without tears. Sometimes it seemed extraordinary to me that people laughed and
joked, had parties, carried on their ordinary lives as though there was nothing to worry about.

But by then I’d begun to notice that grown-ups never
did
talk about anything that distressed or frightened them, or if they did, it was never in front of children like myself. Even
when my small brother, Colin, contracted pneumonia and was in serious danger of dying, my parents attempted to conceal the truth from me. It was eleven days before his temperature dropped, and I
was told afterwards that few babies survived so many days of high fever. I adored Colin, and if I’d known how near he came to dying I’d have been prostrated – mad with grief.

The other anxiety that haunted me for many years, although it decreased as I got older, was that I might be sent to boarding-school. My father sometimes threatened this, generally when he felt I
was leading a life of lazy intellectual isolation. He thought that everyone was better off being active in the open air in groups. It was all very well for him, I used to think: after his war,
leaving his home and family, and seeing all his friends killed, a boarding-school would be nothing to him, but to me it was a temporary equivalent of Hell. It was a recurring threat, which was
probably not serious, but it seemed real enough at the time and induced violent homesickness at the prospect of going anywhere by myself.

On the animal-owning front, I eventually achieved not my wildest dream, a dog, but a cat. My aunt Ruth said one day that she would like to take me out to choose a birthday present. We’d
spend the afternoon looking for what I should like to have. One of our first calls was to the pet department of Selfridges, and there was a full-grown tabby cat with a good deal of white fur and a
twisted tail. He cost ten shillings and I wanted him quite desperately. My aunt said she wasn’t sure that my parents would agree to a cat, and we must look elsewhere. Two or three hours
later, I’d found
nothing I wanted and my aunt gave in. We carried the cat home in a carrier-bag with his desperate white paws scrabbling at the handles to get out. I called
him Bill and adored him. He was accident-prone: got run over several times and I carried him to the vet, but he always recovered even though he had used one of his lives when his tail got broken.
He was also given to fishing my goldfish out of their tank, and I’d find them writhing feebly in his basket. He had beautiful eyes and at least pretended to be fond of me although, being a
practical cat, he preferred the cook.

During these lesson years with Miss Cobham, an aspiration and an activity preoccupied me one way or another almost every day of my life. I wanted to become an actress when I grew up. It had
started when I began to read Shakespeare. Penelope and I continued to invent monologues and enact them to Carol, but we both agreed that what we really wanted was to play parts in complete plays in
real theatres. I wanted to play Shakespeare, but soon realized that all the best parts were written for men. This was initially daunting. However, I conceived the idea of playing Hamlet, never mind
my sex – Sarah Bernhardt had done just that. The way seemed open. The yearning endured for the best part of ten years and was only quelled by marriage and the war – both far into the
future.

My primary activity never left me. It began when I was eight and, despairing of getting enough books to read, I began to write one. It was an interminable tale about a horse – influenced
by
Black Beauty
– and I wrote it off and on for six years until it bored even me to a full stop. But I wrote other things too: short stories, cautionary tales about wicked children and
the heartless consequences they provoked, some poetry and eventually plays. The only short story I can remember was written when I was about nine. It was a tale of the birth of Christ written from
the harassed innkeeper’s point of view. Grannia was so impressed by the story, largely because of its religious content, that she read it aloud to her wretched servants on a Sunday afternoon
when they must have been longing to clear luncheon and put their feet up.

When I was fourteen I wrote my first play, a domestic comedy on the lines of
George and Margaret
, although I’d never seen any plays of the kind. My play was
called, with a certain sense of proportion,
Our Little Life
, and Miss Cobham and I laughed at it like anything. All the stage directions were written in Shakespeare’s terms because at
the time I had read no other plays. I also wrote a Jacobean melodrama, which involved a good deal of fighting with fire irons – and ringing doorbells all round Ladbroke Square trying to find
a girl who would play the soppy heroine.

But through all this I never had the slightest intention of becoming a writer: acting was my aim. To be allowed to go to acting school was my dream, and one of my chief grudges about life was
how seldom I was ever allowed to go to the theatre. Once at Christmas and once for my birthday treat I was taken to the theatre.
Peter Pan
terrified me. I used to lie in bed gazing at
Felix’s dressing-gown, hung on a hook on the back of the door, as it turned in my imagination into Captain Hook with his hook raised menacingly. After
Peter Pan
came a children’s
play called
Where the Rainbow Ends
. It contained a wicked dragon king – wickedness was easily discernible in the theatre since the subject was invariably bathed in bright green light.
Then there was an Indian fairy story called
The Golden Toy
. It was the first time I saw Peggy Ashcroft, who played the princess. I still remember the moment when the lovers are made to swear
that they will part for ever, because of the way she said, ‘I swear: for both of us.’ Subsequently I saw the famous 1936 production of
Romeo and Juliet
with Laurence Olivier and
John Gielgud alternating the parts of Romeo and Mercutio, Peggy Ashcroft as Juliet, and Edith Evans as the Nurse. Carol and I were mad about Gielgud: we’d both been taken to his
Hamlet
as well as the Romeo. She actually met him, or perhaps her father did – anyway, pangs of hopeless jealousy assailed me. I was allowed to see several other Shakespeare plays, but nothing
else.

The same strictures applied to the cinema. The films that my mother deemed suitable seem to me now very strange choices:
The War of the Worlds
, for instance, full of
destruction and terror, and, even more odd, only the beginning of
The Private Life of Henry VIII
– the part where Anne Boleyn is executed, which I found frightening and awful. The rest
of it was reputed to be too ‘full of sex’ for a young girl.

It must appear extraordinary to people now, but at fourteen and for some time after I knew nothing whatever of sex. This was partly the result of not going to school and partly a sheer lack of
interest in the subject. I was extremely interested in love, and anything from Jane Eyre’s vicissitudes with Mr Rochester to Viola’s unrequited passion for Orsino both gripped and
touched me. But I saw it all as romantic passion.

Carol was of fastidious disposition: in all our endless chats, and teas and walks and earnest discussions about life and art, neither of us mentioned sex. When I was fourteen I began to
menstruate and, having no idea what was happening, I thought I was bleeding to death. I staggered into the drawing room where my mother was having tea with someone high up in the Red Cross and
asked her to come out of the room to speak to me. When I told her, she simply gave me some pieces of towelling, a belt and two safety-pins and said that this was an unfortunate thing that happened
to girls – they became ‘unwell’ every month, but one didn’t talk about it. Her evident disgust with the subject – and with me for having raised it – was so clear
that we never said anything more. I did ask Carol, as she was slightly older, whether it had happened to her, and she said yes, years ago. The only other piece of information I gleaned from her was
that she used bought sanitary towels and her mother provided them for the servants as well as themselves. I envied this as I battled with the rags that had to be stuffed into a special bag and sent
to the laundry every month. My mother told me also that I must not swim or ride during these times, but the headaches and appalling stomach cramps were never touched upon and I used to dread them.
My mother made it plain that everything to do with bodies was disgusting and the less said about it the
better. If my mother labelled someone as having a lot (meaning too much)
of SA (sex appeal), it was done with a kind of facetious distaste. And, as I knew by now that Grannia couldn’t be seen either going to or coming from the lavatory, I realized, even then, that
it ran in the family.