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Afterwards, I was made to lie on the floor with my head on one of the coloured cushions that my grandfather called after any of the
students he examined in music whose names
were exotic or silly enough. I can now only remember a small, hard, dark purple one called Gertrude Peppercorn. I was given a bull’s eye or a piece of chocolate, and a book was read aloud.
After a while, I was allowed to sit up and ‘play’ with some of the curious and interesting objects that were scattered about the room. This usually meant staring at things – not
allowed to touch – while my grandmother told me about them. I had no resentment about this, was content simply to gaze – at a complete set of Japanese dolls’ furniture lacquered
in red and black; at a strand of Mozart’s hair, fine and golden like an angel’s, which was tied with a piece of pale blue silk and framed in a pinchbeck locket; at a thin, stiff wooden
doll that had belonged to my grandfather and was called Mr Hampshire, whose painted face, sad and discreet, stared back at me with an expression a thousand years old.

When, by mutual consent, it was time for my visit to finish, I didn’t race back down the street, but walked slowly, crammed with important, tragic thoughts.

‘Well,’ they said, when I got home, ‘was it fun, and what did you have for luncheon?’

They were, in comparison to my grandmother, talking down to me; ‘Roast chicken and meringues’ was too frivolous a reply, and I searched for the most stern and sophisticated
substitute. ‘Cold beef,’ I said, and many Sundays after they had ceased to believe me, I stuck stubbornly to this formula.

Some time that year, we moved from Bedford Gardens to a larger house in Lansdowne Road, Holland Park. Nanny Wilshire had left and was replaced by a much younger nurse called Violet Dunn. She
must have been in her twenties, was enormously fat, and wore navy blue dresses that I think she must have made herself. Robin and I called her Felix. She was very quiet and never got into rages
like Nanny Wilshire – even her displeasure was calm. She played card games with us and helped us with painting. I suspect that she was very sensitive about her appearance, which I think
now was down to some glandular disorder, since she ate very little and was very active. In the new house we slept in a large bedroom with her and I remember her dressing in the
mornings with her back turned to us and enveloped in a very large dressing gown from which she emerged immaculate in her close-fitting navy blue with white Peter Pan collar.

My mother taught me to read, but I was always slightly afraid of her when she taught me things, and didn’t learn until I was six and a half. I wanted to read, and used to take one of the
fairy books off its shelf, and sit in a chair turning pages at what I thought were suitable intervals. Robin, however, could read when he was five, and when he turned six he wrote a book called
Percy Rainsbull Edwards, the Adventures of a Pig
. This, I thought, was my chance to prove my superior grasp of life. He was so young that he had to make up his own story; I’d actually
write a real book, which meant taking one from the bookshelf and copying it. Percy’s life was a dangerous one, and my brother wrote it in a state of abominable fear, while I ploughed away at
transcribing the first chapters of
Happy Families
in block capitals into an exercise book. There was a mixture of boredom and complacency about my task, but in the end, boredom won and I
abandoned it. Robin, trembling with uncertainty, reached a happy conclusion to Percy’s life – back in a field with his mother – after a journey to Africa, with a suitcase marked
PRE, where he was nearly eaten by a ‘snack’. He illustrated the adventures with many pencil drawings and my mother – who could bind books – bound it in soft crimson suede. I
realized then that he had beaten me again, that his book engendered far more interest than mine.

Before we moved – and afterwards – we used sometimes to be taken to Airlie Gardens at the top of Campden Hill. At the end of this short road were wooden gates that opened on to a
courtyard on the left of which was a large rambling house. This belonged to a cousin of my mother’s – a bachelor known as Uncle Mont. We hardly ever went into the house in which Uncle
Mont never
seemed to be, but we were given the freedom of the enormous and wonderful garden – probably about two acres – which was filled with interesting things. For
instance, there were beds all round the house that were filled with cockleshells. There was a terrace on the south side that had squares of aromatic plants interspersed with the paving. At one end
was a perfectly round pond tiled with azure; at the other a veranda with black and white tiled walls and a Chinese gooseberry and a vine smothering its roof. There were flights of steps made of
shaven grass – very soft and charming. They led to a long pergola with roses, and lawns studded with interesting trees. There was a winding path round the edge of this domain and at intervals
there were sunken barrels that collected rainwater. Once I fell into one – head first, and had to be hauled out and taken, black with mud, white with terror, into the house where I was bathed
by my nurse and the housekeeper. Apart from that single misfortune, the place was magic to me at all times of the year. There were gardeners; the only one I remember was called Dick, but for some
time I thought he was Uncle Mont, and it was only when I called him ‘darling Uncle Mont’ (for having such a lovely garden) that they put me right. He had been Uncle Mont’s batman
in the war and was badly wounded, they said. A batman. Did he protect Uncle Mont from bats? Had they wounded him? Were bats dangerous? I never asked: I’d reached an age where I hated
people’s patronizing and laughing response to a serious question. I did ask why we never saw Uncle Mont and my mother said he had a lot of work to do as he was Governor of the Bank of
England. This was another hazard of being my age: often, serious answers made things even more mysterious.

My grandfather was a composer. (He was called ‘Mo’ because he had a beard and was thought to look like Moses.) I don’t think I realized this until I was nearly seven when I wrote
a poem that seemed to me the most beautiful words I’d heard in my life. In those days I was constantly having sore throats, and one day, lying fevered with my throat like a burning cart
track, they brought me
an exquisitely written sheet of music. ‘Your grandfather has made a song of your poem.’ At seven, I couldn’t read music, and my
grandfather sang in a squeaky, out-of-tune voice, so somebody else had to sing it. ‘Lovely,’ I whispered hoarsely.

‘Very nice words,’ they said, ‘about a lovebird coming out of a wood. Why did you think of a lovebird?’ I wanted a blue bird flying out of a dark wood, that was why.
‘But lovebirds are
green
,’ they said. I argued weakly, but the song was ruined for me. I could now see that green bird flying obstinately out of the dark wood – green on
green, and the feeling of colour lost. I never wrote another poem.

I was steeped in Andrew Lang fairy books, and the problem of living half by fairy formulae and half by the strict justice demanded between cousins and siblings occupied me for some years. It was
a long time before I understood the justice in fairy tales and still longer before I perceived the fairy tales in elements of justice.

One day, my grandfather took me to tea with Henry Ford, the illustrator of fairy books, in his studio. I loved his pictures and admired him deeply. The studio seemed dark and dirty: it was
autumn, and the smell was so overwhelming I felt the chairs and tables and curtains were covered with wet paint – even the bread and butter had possibly been varnished. There were small
cherry cakes for tea. The cherries kept falling off and bouncing on the floor, and Henry Ford pounced on them like a dirty bird and popped them into his mouth.

My grandfather asked what he was painting. He was painting thirteen princesses being turned into swans, he said, in a practical voice – here – and he pulled the easel round for us to
see. He was painting exactly that. I counted the princesses and my heart swelled with pride to be having cherry cakes with somebody who had such magical powers, but I was most carefully polite to
him in case his powers extended beyond painting.

Soon after we moved to Lansdowne Road I began to have morning lessons in the dining room with half a dozen other children. A kindly lady called Miss Kettle taught us. She had a
gentle voice, eyes like some nervous nocturnal bird and cheeks like a rubber doll. My fellow pupils fascinated me.

One girl called Rosemary told us that her family kept a python at home. ‘Of course, she’s an only child,’ people said of her. This utterly confused me: for some time I toyed
with the idea of her mother having given birth to a python by mistake, and went to tea, not so much to see the python as to gaze at its mother.

I was by then so steeped in fairy tales that this seemed perfectly possible – indeed, looking at the terms under which I lived, it’s astonishing to me that I was so calm about them.
For instance, the maxim of most fairy tales – that beauty was invariably allied to goodness – caused me only passing regret. I wasn’t one, therefore there was small chance of my
becoming the other. My brother Robin, on the other hand, with his platinum blond hair, brown velvet eyes, and a voice as charming as it was deep and commanding, seemed all set for goodness on a
large scale. I remember one winter afternoon when we were discussing what we should most like to be, and I, assuming an expression of what I hoped was irrevocable goodness, said I should like to be
kind and brave. My brother looked at me, evidently didn’t like what he saw, and gazed dreamily up at the ceiling. ‘I should like to be rich and pretty,’ he said.

You would, I thought, angrily retreating from my hypocrisy, but what would be the good of
my
saying that?

Robin and I had by now accumulated a number of imaginary people: some were fairies, but all of them were more or less magic – that is, unaccountable and powerful. It’s difficult to
say how much we believed in them, but we each ‘owned’ different people, and thus developed a kind of oblique balance of power. Here again, my brother had the whip hand. He owned the
most frightening creature called Ciggi who lived largely in his garden, a piece of cement out of which grew a drainpipe and a Michaelmas daisy. Ciggi was capable of the most terrible rages and
nothing ever
pleased
him: he rumbled with disapproval at everything we –
particularly I – did, with frequent eruptions of threatening wrath. Robin eventually
married him off to someone called Rose, who had golden hair and a nervous giggle, but this didn’t improve his temper and hardly a week passed without my brother announcing that ‘Ciggi
is very,
very
angry.’

Robin himself was capable of Ciggi-like rages when we quarrelled. I remember one awful afternoon when he followed me round a square garden trying to kill me with a huge piece of crazy paving.
His intentions were so bad that they were counterproductive – the paving was too heavy for him to throw it far and I was easily able to evade him.

Robin was a success with all ladies – particularly old ones. He knew exactly what to say to them and it was clear that they thought him delightful. When we both started to learn the piano,
it was Robin who had the ear and could play before he could read. I suppose now I must have been jealous of him although I don’t remember
feeling
that. I was very well aware that he
was the favourite – with our first nanny, with the Yorkshire cook who adored him, but above all with our mother. All I can remember feeling about this is a sense of inferiority. I was thin,
with thick brown lamentably straight hair and a sallow complexion; my brother was clearly more lovable. His being musical was also much in his favour: both my parents, above any other art, revered
music and I had no discernible talent for it.

When Robin was five and a half, he joined the classes with Miss Kettle. Our days were very ordered. Breakfast with our parents in the dining room. After lessons, we had lunch with our mother and
Felix. Then, if we weren’t going to the Swedish gym in Linden Gardens, or having a piano lesson, we went for long walks that lasted until teatime, which we had in the nursery with Felix.
Sometimes our mother would appear, would join us in a game of Old Maid or
vingt-et-un
. She would stay, perhaps, for half an hour and then disappear, to use the telephone – kept in a
bleak little study, which was never used for any other purpose – or to change
for dinner. We would see her later in one of her evening dresses when she came to say good
night to us; by then, we’d have been bathed and given our suppertime apple.

Usually our father would also come and say good night – glamorous in dinner jacket, sometimes even more dazzling in white tie with his medals pinned to the breast of his tailcoat. How
little I knew of their lives! Not only were they parents, as opposed to people, but also I saw comparatively little of them. The occasions when I spent time with my father always seemed especially
festive and unusual – like a birthday. Sometimes he took me out by myself. I remember vividly a winter afternoon when it was the nurse’s day out, my mother had a cold and he drove me to
Kensington Gardens. There was snow – it had snowed off and on for several days and the Round Pond had ice on it. We walked until it was dusk and the park was almost empty of people. I found
an enormous snowball higher than myself. It was a dirty white from much handling, and in the dusk gave off facets of an unearthly blue. As I was staring up at it, wondering how it had been made, my
father, who’d joined me, said in a quiet almost conspiratorial voice, ‘Anyone looking?’

I looked round the snowball and could see only the distant backs of people trudging home.

‘No.’

My father suddenly drew the handle of his walking stick upwards and unsheathed a long, narrow sword with which he cut a large cake-shaped slice out of the snowball. Then he took out his silk
handkerchief, wiped the blade and returned it to its sheath. ‘Don’t tell anyone,’ he said, and I haven’t – until now.