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Peter arranged a chair for me, sat down on a low stool in front of me, and with his paper pinned to a board began his pencil drawing.

I sat like a statue and thought about him. By now I’d learned a little: he’d volunteered for the Navy the moment war had been declared, and after some training had been sent to a
destroyer as lieutenant. He was on sick leave for several weeks after a severe attack of jaundice.

‘
So
lovely! You’ve moved!’

I settled back into the position that made my neck ache.

‘That’s it. Just stay that way. So
lovely
!’

There was a further silence during which he worked very intently, and I collected what else I knew about him. I knew, of course, that he was the son of Captain Scott, who had died heroically on
his way back from the South Pole, and that he looked very like his father. I knew that he was unaccountably devoted to
wild geese and had been living in a lighthouse – that
was romantic – on the Wash. I knew that, as a painter, he concentrated on wildfowl because I’d seen prints of them in people’s houses. I’d picked up that he was an expert
sailor of 14-foot dinghies and had twice won something called the Prince of Wales Cup. He was also, according to K, an incredible skater, and had been asked to enter international competitions in
that field. He seemed successful in everything he did, and was famous in more than one field. He was, to me, quite old at thirty-one years, which increased his glamour.

The drawing was finished and the family gathered to have a look at it. It was good, they all said, but Peter said he could do better, and I felt it looked distressingly like an idealized version
of me.

In fact, as the days went by, I became – temporarily – an idealized version of myself. Whatever we all did – walks in the woods, sailing on the lake, silly word games at meals
and charades after dinner – it took place in the sunny climate of mutual admiration. For one who’d been brought up with the puritan ethic that
nobody
could be publicly
acknowledged to be good at anything, this atmosphere of confidence and triumph was intoxicating. It was also, to some degree, infectious. There was something invincible about the family that
provoked both excitement and comfort.

Bill had been a war hero, a cabinet minister who’d got five hundred thousand people out of slums; he was a poet, an ornithologist, and one of the most noble and completely civilized men
I’d ever met. K was a sculptor of renown, trained by Rodin. For a long time she’d been the widow of Captain Scott and half London had been in love with her: George Bernard Shaw and J.
M. Barrie both read their plays to her. Explorers, prime ministers, artists of all kinds had flocked to her. I don’t think she was ever beautiful but she loved men, to whom she was the most
wonderful, unpredictable company, and she knew exactly how to preserve adoration until it ripened to friendship.

Her two sons were the apples of her eye. Wayland was to be a
great composer, or failing that, prime minister (these asseverations were presented light-heartedly, but somehow
gained in gravity from that), and Peter – Peter was a paragon. I think she loved him more than anyone else in the world because he was her firstborn, because he was fatherless and, no doubt,
because he’d provided the anchor, the reason for making the most of life immediately after and in spite of the grief of widowhood.

Peter certainly hadn’t let her down. His paintings were well known and sold. He’d become a considerable naturalist, as his father had wanted. And now he was embarked upon a career in
the Navy. K was passionately interested in everything that Peter did, said and thought. The family, of course, were all used to this, but I wasn’t. In this atmosphere I felt surer of myself
– except at a dance where Peter turned out to be a wonderful ballroom dancer and I stumbled and stuttered around the room in his arms, with all my family retorts of clumsiness ringing in my
ears. ‘You’ve just got to relax, darling Jenny.’ Afterwards I watched, with sad and hopeless envy, as he and the daughter of the house danced beautifully. I’d never be like
that. Still, I came into my own with the charades.

Ultimately, I was dazzled by the attention of this older, glamorous man. Until then, my relations with the opposite sex had been sketchy and unsatisfactory. At my nursery school a little boy
called Richard, with a hot face and bitten nails, had brought me a bunch of daffodils and two goldfish. ‘You can have them if you’ll marry me.’

I badly wanted the goldfish. ‘All right,’ I said. Afterwards my conscience assailed me. Would I
have
to marry him? Could I give the goldfish back? The daffodils had died.
Someone explained that at that stage of my life such a promise couldn’t be binding. So I got up enough courage to tell him I didn’t want to marry him.

His face went redder. ‘
I
don’t want to,’ he said, ‘I simply
don’t
.’

A second cousin, older than I, who’d just begun his naval career, went riding with me and later sent me a brooch with a pearl crown and a note saying, ‘Je t’aime.’ His
mother asked me to stay, but I
wouldn’t go. And finally, the son of my mother’s friend Angela Thirkell, the novelist, wrote me impassioned letters for about eight
years. In each, he proposed all kinds of ways of meeting, but I generally managed to elude him. He was four years older than I, and I was frightened of him.

Peter was different. During that visit, he set out to charm me – he liked flirting – and I
was
charmed, dazzled by such continuous and flattering attention. Robin, although
two years younger, was far more sophisticated in these matters than I, and told me, much later, that he used to stand outside my bedroom window at Fritton for part of each night in case Peter
turned up – a cold and frustrating exercise since nothing of the sort happened.

Back in London, the Mask Theatre term started. Not only did I have thrilling days of drama school, but every evening for the last week of his leave Peter came to fetch me, drove me home so I
could change, and then took me out – to the theatre, to dinner, to dance. My mother told me later that K had rung her and warned her not to let him break my heart. ‘He has broken many
hearts,’ she had added. He took me to the current fashionable review,
New Faces
, and afterwards backstage to meet Judy Campbell who was starring in it, and sang ‘A Nightingale
Sang In Berkeley Square’ in her beguiling, husky voice. He’d known her since she was sixteen, he said. I’d never been backstage in my life, and was fascinated by the dressing
room, with its mirror surrounded by lightbulbs, its vases of flowers, its screen hung with clothes from the show. Judy was sitting at her dressing table cleaning her face with wads of cotton wool
dipped in a large tub of Trex. She rose to her feet with a cry of delight at the sight of Peter. ‘Can’t kiss you, darling, as you see.’ She was tall, with black hair, and when
Peter introduced me as a student training to be an actress, she turned to me with enthusiastic kindness. Her eyes, which were widely set, were brown. She was very short-sighted, and they glowed at
me with a kind of misty radiance. I still know Judy, and our paths were to cross at intervals over the ensuing years. She became a great star; Noël
Coward was reputed to
want her to replace Gertrude Lawrence, but a happy marriage and children took precedence. She combines an indomitable spirit with an entirely sweet nature. Like the best actresses, she found no
need to act when she wasn’t acting. However, at that first meeting, she simply seemed kind and incredibly glamorous.

Peter asked her to dine with us. Ah, no! What a pity, she was already bespoke. She went behind the screen and emerged seconds later in a dress the colour of her eyes. We left her painting her
beautiful wide lips.

That week was full of new experiences, impressions, and feelings all so compressed that there was no time for reflection, if indeed I had been capable of anything so serious. I was giddy from
such a headlong, intoxicating sequence. One evening, Peter drove me to the Serpentine and we sat in the dark; he talked a little of going back to his ship, then he kissed me, and I felt nothing but
a kind of gratitude.

Before he went, he took me to Ackerman’s gallery where he showed his pictures and gave me a black and white drawing of a nightingale – one of the originals from his
stepfather’s book
A Bird in the Bush
. This thrilled me – an original drawing! The first picture I had ever possessed.

After he’d gone, head a little turned, heart untouched, I resumed my drama studies with single-minded fervour. At last, I felt, my real life was beginning. I possessed boundless energy
and, as a bore, I must have reached a peak that mercifully few people attain. Fortunately, many of the other students were so inclined and we discussed plays, performances, techniques and
inspiration and read Stanislawsky like the Bible. We were taught by a mixed bunch: actors with melodious voices, cynical expressions, and a wholly understandable lack of conviction about the whole
business; stringy, bleached women, who seemed emotionally bankrupt but who continued to go through a reflex of feelings for our benefit, and a few tense specialists who felt that if we could be got
to emulate
a chicken picking up grains of corn it must make some difference to our movements. We also began to rehearse the end-of-term plays we were to perform. I really
don’t think we learned much, but we enjoyed ourselves enormously, and it must have been a great help to our families to be relieved of our egocentric theatrical shop for six hours a day.

Suddenly the war escalated as France fell and the British Expeditionary Force was stranded at Dunkirk. The director of our school disappeared for several days, and on his
return we were surprised to hear that he’d been part of the extraordinary effort to collect the men from the beaches. My family shut the London house and moved to Sussex, but perversely, like
my fellow students, I stuck to the drama of my own making, and travelled six hours every day in order to spend six hours at school.

The war hung over our heads, but we hardly referred to it. Glass fell reluctantly from the roof of the school studio, and was kicked aside by earnest, sandalled feet. A train I was in was
briefly machine-gunned by a German fighter plane, but we new students were rehearsing our first play and were more concerned about whether we’d be allowed to perform it in the Westminster
Theatre.

We were selfish, preoccupied and, I think now, we simply didn’t understand what was going on, as we never considered it long enough to find out. Behind it all was the feeling that
we’d be dragged into it eventually so we had a kind of greedy desperation to get every drop out of every second of the time we had left to pursue our own ends. The play that had been chosen
for us was Barrie’s
Dear Brutus
, a piece that had been very successful in the 1930s when Faith Celli had enchanted audiences in her role as Margaret, the child that the hero does not
have. I was cast as Alice Dearth, his childless, rather bitter wife. I had to play someone nearly twice my age, and for this reason decided I must have a red
wig. I think I was
awful in it – both the play and the wig – but the excitement of playing in a real theatre was tremendous. However, that term was the end of the school: it closed in the autumn as the
blitzes on London began.

I spent the summer in Sussex, where the Battle of Britain was fought over our heads – literally. It became common practice for the family to rush to crashed German planes to prevent the
local farmers attacking the aircrew who’d survived. Feeling was running very high. I remember a bomber, belching black smoke, scraping the trees at each side of our lawn; Colin and Bill, our
cousin, both six years old, eyed it dispassionately. One of them said, ‘Junkers eighty-eight.’

‘Eighty-nine,’ the other responded.

They didn’t mention its state or the enormous explosion when it crashed in a neighbouring field. The weather was cloudless; sometimes one could count up to sixteen parachutes descending
after the zooming noises of engines banking steeply or diving upon their adversary. In the early evening bombers would start their steady drone above us.

My grandfather had decreed that our house, covered in white roughcast, must be camouflaged. Various paints were procured and we all set to; the colours chosen or available were sky blue, salmon
pink and tinned-pea green. The result was staggering, and we must, thenceforward, have provided a most comforting landmark for the bombers as they made their way to London.

I spent much of the summer writing my second play. It was about a woman faced with the choice of continuing her career as a dancer, or marrying a man she loved. The first act presented this
dilemma, the second showed what would happen to her if she stuck to her career, and the third what would happen if she opted for marriage. It was called
Outrageous Fortune
. Each act was
divided into two scenes and I wrote at prodigious speed – a scene in two days. I still used exercise books with lines in those days and read it to my aunt Roona, the wife of one of my
mother’s twin uncles.
She’d been an actress and kindly said she thought it was jolly good.

In the autumn the Mask Theatre school closed, two of its staff decided to start a student repertory company in Devon. Eileen Thorndike, sister of Sybil, and Herbert – Bertie – Scott,
a Northern Irish singer who now specialized in voice training, offered ‘scholarships’ to some of the students, and I was one. With difficulty, I persuaded my mother to let me join the
company. I think they had to pay a small fee for my keep, but nothing for tuition, although there were some paying students as well. There was a small theatre in Bideford, North Devon, and Eileen
found an abandoned house at Instow, three miles outside, in which most of us were lodged. It was a rambling Edwardian house that looked out on to the estuary with the isle of Lundy visible in good
weather.

I was allotted a large bedroom with two other girls, Phoebe and Barbara. The other large bedroom contained Eileen and her three daughters, Phil, Elisabeth and Donny, aged respectively sixteen,
fourteen and twelve. On the same landing were three smaller rooms, two occupied by two more female students, and the other by a sad – we all thought rather old, though she can’t have
been much above forty – Romanian actress called Tansy, who’d just ended a disastrous affair with an English director and had come to get away from it all. Apparently she’d been a
leading comedy actress in her own country and there was a huge photograph of Queen Marie of Romania, corseted to a shape resembling a large cigar, on her dressing-table.