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It’s time to say something about my parents and there has to be an element of hindsight in any sketch I make of them. My memory of how I saw them when I was a young child
is too scrappy, confined to fleeting sensations and pictures – probably from old photograph albums.

After a fairly inadequate education my father left school when the First World War was declared. His brother, a year older, enlisted with the Coldstream Guards and my father naturally tried to
do the same, but they wouldn’t take him because he was seventeen. So he went to the Machine Gun Corps, lied about his age and was accepted. Both brothers went to France in 1914 with their own
horses, but they didn’t meet for fourteen months until, on a lane near Ypres, their horses neighed to each other before they came into sight. Both brothers survived the war.

My father was a major before he was twenty-one. He got a Military Cross and bar, and was recommended for a Victoria Cross – I think the bar was given instead. When I asked him what he had
done to get his medals, he said one was for peeing on a machine-gun to keep it cool so that it would go on firing. The only other information he gave me about his war was when I asked who the
people in yellowing baggy uniforms
were
– the photograph that stood always on his dressing-table. They were his friends, he said. Where were they now? They were all dead. There was a
pause and then he added, ‘All dead, except me.’ He never talked about his time in France. He had spent weeks in gas-ridden trenches, and
his lungs never recovered
from that, but otherwise he was physically unharmed. I think now that in other ways he had been badly damaged. The schoolboy who went to France and did his best there for four years returned to
England as if he was a schoolboy embarking on the holidays.

As I never heard him talk about his war experiences – I never heard any grown-ups talk about the war – it was years before I understood the great conspiracy of silence that must have
tortured so many young men when they came home on leave during the nightmare. How much worse this must have made it for them, and how, to survive, did they deal with it? In my father’s case I
think he dealt with it simply by not growing up. He was a boy when he went out, and he came back crammed with awful knowledge that was never revealed or digested.

He remained a boy – a dashing, glamorous boy – determined to make the best of the holidays, determined that they should go on for ever. He had a job to go to in the family timber
firm of which his father was chairman. He knew nothing whatever about business, but he loved meeting people; he loved buying and selling wood; he loved shooting, skiing, sailing and playing games
– golf, tennis, squash, billiards, chess, bridge. Contract bridge was all the rage after the war. He loved dancing and parties of any kind, and he loved women, who fell for him like rows of
shingled ninepins. I hardly ever heard any women talk about him without mentioning how good-looking he was and how charming. His charm was real, because it was largely unconscious. He was over six
feet tall, had bright blue eyes, a small military moustache, and wavy brown hair that he plastered flat with hair oil. He dressed very well: his suits – many and varied – were always
beautifully cut; with an enormous silk handkerchief in the breast pocket. I always enjoyed watching the grace with which he took off his hat to any lady he met in the street.

He loved music, played the violin, though seldom in my childhood, and music made him cry or at least brought tears to his eyes;
Tchaikovsky was a great favourite. Men liked
him; women were sometimes dangerously keen on him. He was definitely not intellectual, practically never read a book; like Uncle Matthew in
The Pursuit of Love
, he had read one or two and
they were so frightfully good that he didn’t need to look further.

He was one of the most gregarious people I have ever known, totally uncritical of any company he kept, and he behaved, at the slightest encouragement, as though it was his birthday. These
mythical, frequently recurring birthdays were at first a mystery to me – they seemed to happen about once a month without him getting much older. ‘It’s my birthday,’ he
would tell the wine waiter when he ordered champagne, or the shop assistant when he bought five pounds of chocolates to take home.

He was physically very brave and morally a coward, although naturally I’d no idea of this until much later. His younger brother, my uncle John, told me towards the end of his life that
after the war my father had nearly become engaged to a girl called Cicely. Both families were against the marriage, so it didn’t take place. My father married my mother on the rebound, on 12
May 1921.

My mother was the second of four children by my Somervell grandparents. Her older sister, Antonia, was always considered a beauty and married in her early twenties. They had twin brothers.
Antonia was admired for her beauty and her gentle disposition; the twins were admired for being twins and boys, and my mother came a poor last with
her
mother, at least. She was very small,
with a tremendous head of hair – as a young girl she could sit on it – heavy eyebrows, brown eyes, an aquiline nose, and high cheekbones. She was, one of my twin uncles told me, the
intellectual of the family: she read a great deal, and when she was sixteen decided that she wanted to be a ballet dancer. Her father must have supported her in this, as my grandmother
wouldn’t have considered any career necessary or desirable for a woman.

Somehow, my mother got into Enrico Cecchetti’s class, the teacher whom all ballet dancers revered. Visiting ballerinas from
the Ballets Russes would come for classes
with him. I have a picture – a drawing of all the people in the class with her: they include Ninette de Valois, Mimi Rambert, Lydia Kyasht and Lopokova. From this class she was picked up by
Diaghilev to join his company in the
corps de ballet
. Her first rehearsals were in Paris, conducted chiefly in Russian of which she knew hardly a word, and she had three days to learn her
parts in three full-length ballets. This was after Nijinsky’s tragic departure, when Massine was principal male dancer. My mother taught him to read music.

She spent just over a year with the Ballets Russes, after Paris, when they were in Monte Carlo and then Rome. Then she encountered my father and wanted to marry him. This was only possible, my
paternal grandfather said, if she gave up dancing. My mother’s family was pretty hard up. She wasn’t conventionally good-looking, and in 1920 the wholesale slaughter of thousands of men
meant that many women had either lost their husbands or fiancés, or had little hope of finding either.

My mother was clearly bowled over by my father’s glamour and easy charm. I think he was probably the first man she fell in love with, although what precisely that meant for her is hard to
say. She certainly wanted to marry him – according to my uncle John – and that happened. She gave up dancing and took to middle-class married life with more money than she’d ever
had before, servants, a house to keep, but nothing else to do.

My mother wasn’t gregarious. She loved her family, but had few close friends outside it. From her demeanour and attitude to it, it was clear that she never enjoyed sex. What did she and my
father have in common? They both had a sense of humour – could laugh at the same things and make jokes together. They enjoyed sailing and skiing together. I really can’t think of
anything else. A year after marriage she had a daughter – who was either stillborn or died soon after birth. In my grandmother’s prayer book against the date of her birth or death there
is a cross, marked in ink, and ‘I have no name.’ This wasn’t so: she was called Jane – the name my mother
had used for dancing: she had been called Jane
Forrestier, it being
de rigueur
for women dancers to have French-sounding names.

I was born a year later on 26 March 1923 and I was also named Jane although this time there was the prefix Elizabeth. Two and a half years later, she had my brother Robin, and Colin, the
youngest, was born nine years later.

Outwardly my parents’ lives were full of social incident. They had a fairly large circle of friends with whom they went to the theatre, to concerts, to the ‘flicks’, as the
cinema was called, to dinner with each other in their various houses, and to restaurants often to dine and dance. Sometimes they went away for shooting weekends and every year they skied for two
weeks in Switzerland, and went sailing in Cornwall. Robin didn’t mind them going away, but I was miserable for weeks before they left: used to cry in bed about it. I’d not have minded
my father going away, which he sometimes did anyway, on business, but I couldn’t bear the idea that my mother wasn’t in the house, was nowhere, out of sight, unreachable. In those days
the telephone wasn’t used as a means of keeping in touch, so there was silence for the two weeks, which always seemed interminable to me.

Christmas Day of my sixth or seventh year had been a haze of excitement. There was feasting and everybody was smiling. There were wonderful presents that were deliciously divided between things
I’d always wanted and things I’d never even heard of, the best being a little toy pony with real pony fur, and a cart for him to draw, and a stable for him to sleep in. Suddenly, after
tea, a stroke of doom – a ripple of departure in the room, an acceleration of bonhomie and then the blinding moment when I realized that both my parents were going away, that minute, to a
place called Switzerland for a holiday. They’d kissed me and had gone. I was left sitting on the nursery floor surrounded by a sea of presents and undulating waves of tissue paper. In vain
did various aunts and uncles point out their generosity to me. The gorgeous presents became valueless as the front door distantly slammed. They couldn’t
compensate for the
interminable time and unknown distance of two weeks in Switzerland, because I suddenly knew that they had nothing to do with each other. After the nursery formula of ‘You can have a sweet
after tea if you’re good,’ this was a discovery. Presents couldn’t always be equated with feelings or behaviour and were sometimes entirely unrelated. I remember looking at the
toys and finding that I’d exchange any one or the whole lot of them for my mother’s immediate return.

I can’t now think how my mother managed to get through the days with the hiatus between breakfast and the time when she had to dress for the evening. Sometimes a friend came to lunch or
she went shopping. She went riding before breakfast in Rotten Row. There was a loom in one of the attics on the top floor, but I never saw her use it.

She had many, some unusual, accomplishments, most of which she seemed to have relinquished by the time I became aware of her. She could bind books, weave, spin; she was a most accomplished
needlewoman – she made christening robes and little white muslin frocks for Robin with a great deal of drawn thread work and fine white cotton embroidery. She could play the piano and
recorder, and later learned to play the zither – a tortuously difficult and unrewarding instrument. She could use gold leaf and designed beautiful elaborate capital letters for a book of
Shakespeare’s sonnets that she’d made and bound for her mother when she was about twenty. She became one of the two women in London allowed to school the Life Guards’ horses at
their riding school. At one point she tried to teach me the rudiments of ballet. I remember agonizing mornings with me holding on to the bath rail while she hit my bare legs with her riding crop in
an endeavour to get me to place my feet properly in the positions. I was clumsy, terrified of displeasing her, and acutely aware that I was doing so; I became paralysed with stupidity and fear.

When I was about seven, something happened that impressed me very deeply. We were walking with our mother one spring
evening along a narrow pavement on one side of which was
an enormously high wall that enclosed Campden Hill reservoir. At intervals there were gas lamps, which were lit each evening by a man with a mysterious long pole. The street was empty, except for a
shabby little man about half-way down it. He was leaning with his back to the wall. As we approached, he took a few uncertain steps away from us, put his hand to his head and pitched forward
straight into the road. My mother told us to stay where we were, and went up to the man. We watched him speechlessly; he was sitting now in the kerb – rubbing his head with his hands. He was
a pale old man with dirty white hair. My mother helped him to his feet and then gave him some money: his trousers were round on his legs and he had crabbed, nervous hands that he kept putting in
and out of his pockets. Eventually, he trembled off down the road and disappeared in the soft grey evening.

What was the matter with him? Was he very ill? He was just very weak from being so hungry, my mother said. She had given him half a crown and he would buy some food and then he would be all
right, she added, and I suddenly saw her looking at me and didn’t believe her. The idea of somebody fainting with hunger was as new as it was horrible: I had no idea how many meals could be
bought with half a crown, but when the old man had eaten them what would he do then? He might faint again when there was nobody to give him anything. Why had we not given the old man more or,
better still, taken him home where there were meals for ever? I don’t remember a satisfactory answer to my questions, and the argument – then presented – that there were other old
men or people in the same predicament simply widened the horror that this first impingement of the world outside my life exposed.

I don’t remember having any serious friends before we moved to Lansdowne Road. There were children’s tea parties – usually near Christmas – but I dreaded them: the milk
tasted different and I was frightened of pulling crackers. A nanny stood behind each child’s chair – like a footman – and they talked to one another
while the
children ate silently, or wept because they weren’t enjoying themselves. The first friend I do remember having was a charismatic girl, several years older than I, called Nicola. She told me
that she could do magic, and one day, when we were walking to Kensington Gardens, she told me that she’d lost her doll. ‘But I can get it back any time I like.’ How could she do
that? She stopped, selected a stone, and stamped on it. ‘There! Now the doll will come back.’ The next day there she was with the doll. I was most humbly impressed, knowing I could
never do anything like that.