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They kept waking me up and pouring cups of tea and water down me ‘to bring the milk in’. It came in all right, but poor Nicola, premature and probably as tired and sleepy as I,
didn’t want
to drink it. Countless times they put her to my breast, and pinched her to wake her up, and she turned her head away and cried. My breasts became agonizing,
they produced a pump, but that, like the rubber mask, proved to have something wrong with it. On the day that Nicola was born Jock had been called up to the forces, and his wife, Una, also a
doctor, had taken over his practice. On the second day after Nicola’s birth I screamed if anyone touched my breasts, then couldn’t stop crying. When Pete, on one of his visits, said he
had three more days’ leave and was going to Fritton, I cried more than ever. ‘You really must pull yourself together, darling,’ he said, and I recognized the irritation I’d
provoked when I had cried on leaving Seaford. ‘K is sending a hundred snowdrops and a hundred pounds for Nicola,’ he said, before he left.

I was in the nursing-home for a further week. I never saw Nicola except when she was screaming. They’d bring her in a quarter of an hour before feeding time and leave her in her basket
howling out of my reach ‘to encourage the milk’. There was no problem about the milk, I had enough for two babies, but when I suggested that perhaps I might feed one of the other babies
in the nursing-home whose mothers had no milk, they looked shocked and said it wouldn’t do. My father sent me some flowers, which made me cry because I wished that Pete had done that instead
of simply going away and leaving me. When, after ten days there, I was allowed to go home to bed – you were meant to stay in bed for three weeks then – it was with a monthly nurse. We
soon discovered why poor Nicola had been screaming so much: her bottom was raw, as her nappies hadn’t been changed anything like often enough.

It was a great relief to be home, but the monthly nurse wasn’t much better than the nurses in the home had been. She, too, adopted the practice of keeping Nicola in the nursery until she
started to cry with hunger, then placing her out of my reach to howl for ten minutes before her feed. When she’d drunk enough, she fell asleep. For the first month of her life I had no time
with
her that wasn’t fraught with this four-hourly trauma. I became afraid of her. I’d not wanted her enough and was no good as a mother.

An extraordinary letter I got from the wife of one of my father’s friends reinforced this feeling. It was long, and began by congratulating me on having the greatest joy known to women.
‘Now, at last you will understand that everything we have to go through in marriage with a man is recompensed by this great joy – the only reason for marriage.’

Eventually, the monthly nurse left. She’d not enjoyed her time with me, frequently making it clear that she was used to grander establishments where there was a proper staff. The only good
thing she did for me was to introduce me to Tampax. She’d also been impressed by ancient Cousin Susy’s visit, in a very large old car with a chauffeur and a companion.

My aunt Ruth had procured a young nurse for Nicola, who’d been trained at her Babies’ Hotel. Rose was nineteen – the same age as I was. She was pretty and very serious about
her job. It was she who taught me how to change nappies and bath Nicola. We were shy with one another, but I was grateful for her expertise. Also she didn’t bring Nicola in to cry before
feeds. On her days out I had some time alone with Nicola when she was awake. We could look at each other and I could talk to her. I felt very tentative about this, afraid I’d do the wrong
thing, which, of course, sometimes happened. Usually she would regard me with her slaty blue eyes in a wondering, appraising manner, but the first time she smiled I was so excited that I kissed
her, whereupon she squirmed away from me with an expression of distaste. She doesn’t love me, I thought. How could she? I wasn’t good as a mother; I didn’t seem to have the
feelings that were expected, and while I could conceal this from other people, I couldn’t deceive her. Alone with her I’d say things like ‘I do
like
you, and I do want us
to be friends.’ But I felt guilty about her, as I’d never felt about anything else in my life.

When Nicola was about two months old, we went to Fritton. We went by train, which in those days took four hours. Once before I’d travelled with Bill from Liverpool Street
where he was met by the station master in his top hat and we were conducted to a splendid empty carriage, but this time we had no such advantage, were crammed into a compartment crowded with
servicemen. About three hours into the journey it became clear to me that Nicola was hungry and I needed to feed her, so I did. Everybody in the compartment behaved perfectly about this; a few
tactful smiles and otherwise they took no notice.

K was overjoyed to see the baby. The whole family loved babies, and Nicola bore a marked resemblance to Pete, with a slightly turned-up nose and a little dimple in her chin. I remember Wayland
asking me how I felt and saying that, according to the wedding service, I was supposed to be like a fruitful vine, and look at me, one little grape. Thereafter, he always called her ‘the
Grape’. But when I innocently let out that I’d fed Nicola on the train, I could see that K wasn’t pleased. There was a lunch for a lot of old admirals (as I called them –
they can’t
all
have been admirals), but they were certainly, in my terms, old. After we had eaten, K suggested that I should bring Nicola into the drawing room to feed her, she was
sure that nobody would mind. The thought of a lot of old men eyeing my breasts filled me with nausea, and I escaped to my bedroom. Why was it all right for the admirals to watch me –
lecherous old sods – and not all right to feed Nicola in the train
when she needed it and there was nowhere else to go? These rifts were beginning to appear between my
mother-in-law and myself. She also made it obliquely clear that as I’d not had a son I should return to the charge as soon as possible. The thought appalled me. It was lovely to go about in
my normal clothes again, not to feel ill, cumbersome and unwieldy, but I felt guilty.

Wayland had a friend – a fellow Stoic, an old boy from Stowe School – staying with him. Charles Newton was an exuberant eccentric: his mother was French, a widow, and he used to ring
her up pretending to be Proust. He was in the Army and very light-hearted about it. He would do imaginary charges down the lawn ending in an exaggerated fall when he would shout, ‘Death of
Charles!’ He cheered me up as I had bouts of intense depression about motherhood. ‘What’s it like, having a baby?’ he asked me one day.

‘I don’t know, I haven’t been doing it long enough,’ I answered, and he looked at me carefully and dropped the subject.

K didn’t think much of my capacity in that direction. I think she was keen enough on babies to detect my failure in this respect. It would have been so far from her deepest convictions I
don’t think she would have been able to understand it. It was ‘unnatural’, as indeed I felt too. To be unnatural is like a sin, judged wrong by other people and, worse, by
oneself. I see now that Nicola and I had the worst possible start in life, and that most of what happened to me wouldn’t happen now, but this is hindsight, which, by its nature, is no good at
the time. I can say now, and could have said for many years, that I love my daughter as much as I love anyone in the world, but the bad start led to much unhappiness for both of us, and I, being
the elder, must accept the blame.

I think now that things might have been different if there had been anyone who I could have trusted enough to talk to about all of this, but there wasn’t, or at least I could think of no
one. I was certain that any confidence I made about my lack of maternal feeling would simply be treated as unnatural or mad, and I couldn’t face either indictment.

Something happened when I was at Fritton that further undermined me. I had gone for a walk in the woods with K. She was talking about Peter, and then she suddenly said,
‘I suppose you’ve realized now that Pete only married you to have a son.’ I said, no, I hadn’t, but my heart began to pound. She looked me straight in the eye and then said,
‘If you ever make Pete unhappy I shall want to stab you. I should enjoy doing it.’ The woods around us were chequered with flickering sunlight and I suddenly thought of the Iroquois in
Conan Doyle’s book
The Huguenots
, their terrible savagery and courage, and the same sense of chill recurred. Then she put her arm in mine and said, in a quite different voice,
‘Oh, Jenny, you’re very
young
. Let’s go
home
.’ And we went.

Two other incidents occurred during the first two years of my marriage. I can’t place them exactly in time, but they were both illustrative of the mutual distrust that was building between
us.

One was when I was lying in bed with Pete, who’d gone to sleep. The bedroom door opened noiselessly and, silhouetted against the light in the passage, I saw K standing motionless. I waited
to see whether she would speak, but after a few moments she retired, and the door was shut again. I remember I actually felt frightened of her, and lay awake for a long time afterwards wondering
whether she would come back and what would happen if she did.

The second was when I came in to breakfast late; everyone else had had theirs. Pete was away at the time, and on my plate was a letter from him. It was addressed to me and it had been opened
– quite carelessly, no steaming of the gum from the envelope, but torn, and I knew at once that K had opened it and presumably had read the contents. The envelope was addressed to me; it was
my
letter. This time I didn’t feel afraid, I felt furiously angry, but I was too craven to confront her. Instead I told Pete the next time I saw him. His reaction was far from
reassuring: she always liked his letters, he said; when he was away, she always opened them, and he didn’t mind. He couldn’t, or wouldn’t, see any distinction between a private
letter in his hand addressed to me and any other letter that
people might write to him. His handwriting, I must say here, was beautiful, absolutely clear and distinctive.
‘Couldn’t you tell her not to do that?’ He answered easily that he was sure she wouldn’t do it again and so far as I know, she never did.

It was a great relief to return to Clifton Hill. Dosia was installed and she attracted friends like a magnet. Geraint Jones and his first wife Margaret came to stay. They had a daughter of about
the same age as Nicola. Rose was on holiday, so Margaret and I struggled with the business of getting through our babies’ day. This was far more arduous than it is now.

To begin with we had dozens of nappies to rinse, soak, rinse, boil and dry. This had to be done every day, as in spite of two dozen Turkish towels and two dozen Harrington squares there was
always the danger of running out of clean dry ones. At three months my milk began to give out, and I began weaning Nic. For some reason I was dead set against giving her tinned or powdered baby
food, as I felt that fresh cow’s milk would be far more healthy. This had to be diluted, sugar added and the feeds made up. When a feed was needed the bottle was reheated in a pan, then the
milk tested on the back of the hand for the right temperature. Then there was the ceremony of the morning bath. This happened in the nursery, in a tub that was filled with jugs of warm water from
the bathroom. Nic enjoyed her bath, but hated having her hair washed.

In the afternoons, Margaret and I wheeled our babies round the streets – we were too far from a park. Margaret was a frenetic, intellectual girl, no more handy than I with all the
paraphernalia, and when, by seven thirty, we got Isobel and Nic fed and to bed, and could turn our weary attention to knocking up some sort of supper, Margaret would look at me and say, ‘What
have we
done
today?’

‘Nothing, except get them both a day older.’

Rose eventually left to get married when Nic was a few months older, and my mother found a nanny from Sedlescombe, a neighbouring village in Sussex. Bombing raids had started again that
autumn, and I’d taken Nic down to Sussex, because every time I took her out in her pram in London an air-raid warning went off.

I was very much on my dignity meeting Nanny Buss for the first time; she wasn’t young like Rose, but had been a nanny for years. However, my dignity was punctured before I’d said a
word to her by Colin bursting into the room and saying, ‘I say, Jinny, I suppose you know that Nanny is at least twice your age.’ Nanny Buss was gentle and kind and pretended not to
notice. She was a wonderful nanny, very untidy but everything was kept spotlessly clean, and she adored Nic from the moment she saw her until she died many years later. I returned to Clifton Hill
with a light heart.

Inmates there had proliferated. Apart from Dosia, there was my cousin Audrey, who had a job in London and went home at weekends, and Denis Pipe-Wolferston, a friend of Wayland. Wayland and he
had met when they were both ordinary seamen, and Wayland had made some disparaging remark in Greek about the man drilling them, to which Denis had instantly replied in kind. Denis had some job in
the Admiralty. Apart from the four of us, many people came to stay – some quite regularly. Roland Oliver, another Stoic and Cambridge friend of Wayland, came almost every weekend. He worked
at Bletchley and never mentioned the nature of his work. He was appalled by my ignorance, and was the first person to make me a reading list that I remember began with the Miracle plays and ended
with
Middlemarch
. There was Peter Tranchell, another Cambridge friend. He turned up one afternoon – I’d never seen him before – and said, ‘Is Wayland here?’ I
said no, he wasn’t, but that he did come sometimes. ‘All right, I’ll wait.’ And he did – for days.

He was a composer, and sat in my grandmother’s huge chair enveloped in a mothy fur coat – the house was always cold – writing music. He introduced me to the works of the
novelist Ronald Firbank, and the Russian/Armenian composer Aram Khachaturian. He was very funny and had a faintly devilish appearance. We called him Mephi, and he used to write me long, nonsensical
letters in his
large, sprawling hand. Sometimes the paper would be scorched and he would put ‘pardon my enthusiasm’ in the margin.