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There was a short silence and then someone got up and said, ‘Jane Howard.’

For one blissful moment I thought I was going to be rescued, but no.

‘Oh.’ She looked put out. ‘That wasn’t the person I had in mind.’ We had had, two weeks earlier, a new addition to the form: a pale rather fat girl who smelt.
Almost as soon as she arrived, she, too, had become a target, and I do remember my shameful relief when this
meant that they paid less attention to me. I didn’t take part
in the bullying, but I didn’t defend her. The headmistress gave us all a talking-to about our behaviour, a warning that if it continued punishments would ensue, and marched out of the room.
The form didn’t bully Eleanor again, but redoubled their assaults on me.

My only escape was in illness, and, being prone to chronic sore throats and frequently going without lunch, this wasn’t difficult to achieve. It was decreed I was to have a whole summer
term off and stay in Sussex at the Beacon with Felix.

We went there in June, and I’d never seen the country in that month before. We arrived in the early evening, in windless sunlight, and out of my bedroom window I could see one of our large
meadows at the end of which were silhouetted two graceful pines. I didn’t want tea: I wanted to be in the meadow immediately and rushed out to the middle of the green and golden field. It was
full of flowers and delicate grasses: ox-eye daisies, toadflax, poppies, little purple orchids and some taller pale mauve ones, buttercups, ladies’ smock, meadowsweet, Queen Anne’s
lace, bugle, cow parsley, clover, both red and white, little daisies with crimson tips to their white petals and purple vetch tangled with the grasses. I lay down in it; the whole sensation of
being in this richly embroidered place, with the minute buzzing and ticking and whirring of its many insect inhabitants, gave me intense feelings of pleasure, of happiness, of perhaps the first joy
in my life. I can shut my eyes now, nearly seventy years later, and go back to it. It was then that I began to love the country.

All that summer term I luxuriated in my freedom and spent the mornings up apple trees in the orchard reading E. Nesbit and Captain Marryat and L. R. M. Ballantyne – I had a great wish to
be shipwrecked. Often I’d stop, simply to think of the hot classroom full of enemies, now so far away and I where they could never find me. The house was empty except for Felix and me. She
took me for walks in the afternoons, but they weren’t like London walks and I enjoyed them.

A couple that lived in a cottage above the stables kept the house. Mr Woodage was the gardener and Mrs Woodage the cook. She had a lemon-yellow complexion, which contrasted
fiercely with her pitch-black hair. She wasn’t a good cook, even by British standards of food in those days. The family called her puddings ‘Mrs Woodage’s Revenge’. She
produced grey meat, potatoes boiled until they had a battered, furry appearance, and cabbage until it was almost colourless. But in June there were strawberries, followed by raspberries and
luscious dessert gooseberries. Milk arrived in the evenings, steaming in a pail from Mr York’s farm. I didn’t mind drinking cold milk from a mug, and steadily became less scrawny and
pinker. There was a yellow satinwood piano in the drawing room and, free from tuition or having to practise overseen by my mother, I could spend hours sight-reading easier pieces by Mozart and
Haydn without criticism.

But in September, I was sent back to school. I dreaded it, of course, but the alternative – only idly suggested as a kind of threat for any subversive behaviour – was a
boarding-school and that filled me with such icy terror I felt anything would be better. I’d also decided on a possible way to lessen my troubles. There were, of course, a number of things
that weren’t allowed at school and consequently quite often the more daring pupils would break a rule or two to show that they weren’t intimidated. I’d do as many of these things
as came my way, and thus earn a reputation for daring. And so . . . I can’t remember all of them, but a good example was climbing up an outside staircase at one end of the playground in order
to pick the leaves from the mulberry tree that leaned against it at the top. Silkworms were in fashion. One was always caught: it was simply a matter of how many leaves you could pick and stuff
into your capacious navy blue knickers before a mistress called you down. I always came down with a few leaves in my hand that were promptly confiscated, but the others were shared out in the
changing room, and briefly – but only too briefly – I was accepted.

There were two other compensations that winter. The school was to perform Gluck’s
Orpheus
and, as in those days I could sing quite well, I had the good luck to be
included in the chorus. I enjoyed the rehearsals very much, and they sometimes got me off games, which was a great relief. I loathed netball, so singing and listening to Orpheus and Eurydice was a
marvellous alternative.

The other plus was that I actually made a school friend. She was called Tony Imrie and came from Cape Town. Unfortunately she was two years older than I, and therefore a form ahead, so I could
only see her in breaks or at lunch. She saw that I was bullied, and remonstrated with one of the bullies who left me alone after that. She used to come to tea with me at home. I loved her; I
don’t think I had a passion for her, I simply felt comfortable in her company as well as proud of having a friend.

Towards the end of that winter term the blow fell. She was going back to South Africa. For good? For good.

We didn’t talk much about it. I knew, somehow, that it was far sadder for me than it was for her. She was going home, and although she was too kind to say so, I sensed that she was looking
forward to it. ‘I’ll miss you,’ she said, when she came to tea for the last time. ‘I’ll write to you,’ she said, as we parted.

She did write once, sending me a photograph of herself sitting on a beach. I wrote back. That was the end of it.

Two other things happened while I was at school. In the spring term my grandfather came to examine those pupils who played an instrument. Part of the test was sight-reading and I came second.
‘Favouritism!’ howled my form, but in fact I think Grandfather would have erred on the stern side when it came to judging me in public. The headmistress adored him, and alluded to me in
her speech to him in the assembly hall, which didn’t help matters.

The other thing was far more serious. One morning when we were in the hall for prayers, she said she had a very sad announcement to make. Margaret Jennings had died the previous weekend.
She’d fallen out of a window on to a stone terrace. The
head-mistress wanted the whole school to pray for Margaret and her poor parents. Margaret Jennings was in a form
lower than mine, and therefore I didn’t know her well, but her death, the first I’d ever confronted, impressed and shocked me for months. I kept imagining her leaning out of her bedroom
window – perhaps to smell the garden below her, or to see something that seemed too far away – and then the awful moment when she must have known that she’d leaned too far, was
falling, couldn’t stop herself. How long could she have felt that before she hit the stone? And was she then instantly dead? While writing this I have realized for the first time how many
events occurred, people I knew, and feelings I had in these years that I kept to myself. There was no one to whom I could talk about things that touched me most nearly.

After the winter term, I was ill again, and it was decreed I should still attend school, but do no homework. I staggered through one more term, after which I learned I was to leave. The relief
was enormous, but I’d sunk to such a state of fear and stupidity that my only accomplishment was a shaky literacy. I could read and write, but otherwise I felt a complete failure, was afraid
of people my own age and, above all, distrusted myself. I didn’t seem able either to do or to be anything that engendered affection.

Robin had gone to a prep school and I missed him desperately and refused to sleep in the nursery where we’d both been. Felix had left the previous summer. For some reason, my mother had
told her not to tell me she was going, not even to say goodbye. I thought at first she was having her day off and the discovery that she had gone – that I’d never see her again –
made me feel more frightened of life than ever. I didn’t know what was going to happen; I desperately wanted to tell someone about the awfulness of school, to dispel some of it by telling
Robin. Pinewood, his school, seemed to me perfect and I longed to join him there, but in spite of wearing grey shorts all the holidays I completely failed to change sex as I’d hoped I
would.

Weeks of summer and the country lay before me. I always felt sick in the car going down, but once we arrived, I was like a dog let off its lead. The freedom! There was a pony
to ride, and bicycles – all the cousins had one. To begin with I could only dismount by running into a hedge, a practice much disliked by the gardener. There was an old apple orchard with
trees to climb; there were nutwoods – little shaded gnome-like trees that in the autumn were full of Kentish cobs. There were two walled gardens – walls were also much climbed. There
was the Very Very Old Car – Robin was particularly addicted to driving it, making engine noises and sounding the imaginary horn. In the house there were two dining rooms, the hall for
children and the real one for grown-ups. If there weren’t too many of us, we were allowed to eat with them. And here I come to the household of cousins and their parents.

My father had two brothers, the one older than him who’d preceded him in going to war whose real name was Alexander but who was invariably called Geof, and John, much younger, who was a
painter and taught at Oundle School. He was usually called Jerry and sometimes Jibe, and we all admired his capacity to imitate people and his general funniness.

Geof’s wife, Aunt Helen, was an American of striking beauty. She had a fine, pale complexion, very fine, curly dark hair, but the most attractive feature was her eyes: they were sea blue
and looked at you with a wonderful frankness. She was an intellectual, she read widely, she was volatile, and she had . . . not wit exactly but a dry
sense of irony that could be
entertaining, even to a child. My uncle Geof adored her, and she had two traits that were much approved of by the Howards: she was extremely family-minded – joined the club, as it were, with
ease – and she had a rigorous talent for self-deprecation that was deeply approved of by my grandmother and my aunt Ruth, my father’s sister who never married and lived with her parents
all their lives. Indeed, it seemed to me, Aunt Helen was adored by the whole family.

You were
never
good-looking or, worse, clever, or actually good at anything; you could admire others, and if they were present, they’d instantly deny, discount and throw off praise.
When any of us children innocently announced some minor triumph, we were firmly put down. It has occurred to me that the difficulty I have had all my life in hearing or taking in anything nice that
is said to me stems from this family tradition. Modesty was uniform: you must at all costs not get
above yourself
.

Aunt Helen had one obsession that didn’t go down well. She was an early follower of the Hay diet, and the family considered food simply as good plain fuel presented at regular intervals
– the less said about it the better. To want outlandish things like orange juice or salads, or a baked potato at teatime was regarded as both faddish and foolish. Food at the Beacon consisted
of eggs and bacon and Force or grapenuts for breakfast followed by bread and butter and marmalade. Lunch was usually a roast of some kind with boiled potatoes and greens, and dinner for the adults
much the same. We were given a substantial tea, and supper hardly existed. Salads meant a few lettuce leaves, cut-up tomato and cucumber, with slices of cooked beetroot lying on top and bleeding
unattractively on to the rest. Cheese was Cheddar. Puddings were rice, steamed sponges or jelly. There was delicious fruit in season: strawberries, raspberries, gooseberries, the currants of all
three colours, plums, apples, pears and a black grape grown in the greenhouse that bore heavily every year. The grown-ups drank gin, whisky and wine. We drank water, with orange squash for
birthdays.
Talking about food was considered to be what Aunt Ruth called ‘unnecessary’.

Uncle John’s wife, Kathleen – Aunt Kate – was Anglo-Irish, and even when I was quite young it was clear to me that neither my mother nor Aunt Helen liked her. I think that they
tried to be nice to her, but neither of them seemed to realize that it’s no good being nice
to
someone and nasty
about
them: the insincerity rings true to the unfortunate
subject.

These intimations I had of adult relationships were occasional; for the most part of those years of Easter, summer and Christmas holidays I was absorbed in life with a steadily increasing number
of cousins.

The Beacon wouldn’t hold all these cousins, their parents and nurses at once, so we took turns to occupy it. This meant that occasionally my mother took us to stay with various relations
of hers, Balfours, Collets and Normans, in their far grander houses: to Dawick in Scotland near Peebles owned by cousins Freddie and Gertrude Balfour. I have dim recollections of the house –
a huge nineteenth-century pile approached by a long drive whose verges were flooded with daffodils. Cousin Freddie bought his daffodils by the ton, they said. This impressed me deeply.

The gardens were beautiful; Cousin Freddie was a keen botanist and gardener. There was a pheasantry with pens of exotic varieties – the Lady Amherst and the Golden Reeves I remember
– and brilliant little jungle fowl ran wild over the walks and lawns. There was a rectangular lake with a battered boat in which Robin and I spent a great deal of time quarrelling about who
should row. Back for meals in the house we graduated from rage and sulks to neutrality and eventually to our ordinary comfortable relationship.

At one end of the immense garden was a glen that ascended to a small mountain. One afternoon I decided to climb the mountain by myself. I set off feeling calm and adventurous, but when I was
little more than a third of the way up through the heather and tufted grass I suddenly became exceedingly frightened, menaced by some
terrible unknown, unseen force. The fear
became panic: I fled back down the mountain into the steep glen, hurtling down past its mossy rocks and banks of wild garlic and ferns. I was sobbing with terror as I ran, but when the edge of the
garden came into view, I felt safe and stopped and sat on a large boulder to recover. I couldn’t go back to the house crying because they’d ask me why and I’d no idea. It’s
very distant now but for years afterwards I’d stumble, in memory, upon that first moment of unaccountable fear and it would all flood back – the crying, the urgent need for flight.