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We went to stay with my paternal grandparents in Sussex, but although I subsequently got to know and love the house and the country that surrounded it, early memories are faint and hazy. I
remember the beautifully kept lawns, the scent of lavender hedges, the exciting and wonderful aroma of the stable – four loose-boxes with the names of the occupants on the wall of each box. I
remember being lifted up to stroke the satin-furry noses of the horses, whose mobile lips would move to reveal what looked like large yellow false teeth. The greenhouses built against the back of
the stable walls, full of tomatoes and nectarines and grapes, smelt overpoweringly sweet, and my grandmother would pick the smallest ripe tomatoes for me to eat.

She gave me a little piece of garden and bought me a rose to put in it, but this gesture had a catch: I was to drink a glass of hot milk every evening in return because, she said, I was too
thin. I loathed hot milk, indeed any milk in a glass – milk had to be in china – and water in a cup tasted quite wrong too. I struggled with the hot milk for several nights before I
said she would have to take her garden back because I couldn’t bear the milk with its perpetually recurring skin. I don’t remember the outcome of this, except I can clearly hear her
saying, ‘At least you spoke the truth. You must always do that. There is no such thing as a white lie.’

This grandmother was one of seven sisters born to William Barlow, a crystallographer of some note. I was always told that there
were few men in Europe versed enough in his
subject for him to talk with. He was a member of the Royal Society, and his gardener once entered a competition in the local pub for whose boss was the definitive gentleman; he won on the grounds
that he had been with my great-grandfather for thirty years and never saw him do a stroke of work. My great-grandmother was tiny, and reminded me of a rag doll. One couldn’t imagine that she
had a body: she was simply a face with her hair smoothed back into a bun, clothes underneath and black shoes peeping out at the bottom of her grey and black attire. The only story I remember about
her was that when she was eighty-nine she picked up
The Times
one day, went carefully through the deaths column, then threw it aside in a rage: ‘Not a soul that I know.’

It’s clear that their daughter, my grandmother, Florence – invariably called the Witch because she had such an unwitchlike nature – was the beauty of the family. My earliest
memories of her are clear and easy, because she didn’t seem to age. She wore the same sort of skirt with cardigans of the same shades, black shoes and pale stockings and a gold wrist-watch in
whose band was tucked a fine lawn handkerchief. She had a high white forehead, good cheekbones, and eyes that were charming because they looked at you with such direct and simple honesty. She was
without vanity or pretension of any kind; she loved music and jokes and would literally cry with laughter. She played the piano remarkably well: used to accompany my aunt’s violinist friend
and play duets with Myra Hess who was a great friend of the family.

She also loved gardening, her rock garden and her roses being special pleasures. She kept the house with Victorian thriftiness: food was always seriously plain. Boiled mutton and semolina
‘shape’ were usual, and she wouldn’t allow me to have both butter and marmalade on breakfast toast. Toast was indeed a luxury to her. It was taken at teatime when she boiled the
kettle on a spirit lamp and made the tea herself. I don’t remember her ever leaving the various houses and gardens in which she lived, except in the
country when she was
sometimes driven to Battle where she’d visit the butcher and Till’s, the wonderful ironmongery and garden-implement shop. Otherwise, I think she was content with her marriage, her three
sons and one daughter.

Sometimes, on the surface, my paternal grandparents seemed rather ill-matched. He was a man of enormous energy who enjoyed whatever he did, loved good wine and food, his clubs, his riding, his
family and almost everyone else. She was domestically and musically inclined – I don’t think music meant much to him. However, there was a feeling of stability and success about their
marriage. There were moments of strain when he would come down from London and announce that the Rajah of ‘Somewhere or other’, the Governor General of Western Australia, and a very
nice man he had met in the train were coming for the weekend. ‘Really, Alec!’ And she’d get up from the table and send for housemaids and the cook, but she was only serenely
cross.

Alexander Howard, this grandfather – called the Brig because he had never been in the army – was devoted to his family, but as a young child I was terrified of him. Although he was
known for his instant rapport with people, he felt with children that the impersonation of some wild animal at maximum volume was the most genial approach. He would emerge slowly from his study,
roaring or growling, and accompany either noise with gestures of such ferocious goodwill that I screamed with terror and, when old enough, fled from him. I was his eldest grandchild, and
subsequently he had many opportunities to temper his approach, but it took me years to recover from it.

In all his houses that I can remember, he always had a study where he must have spent a good deal of time, but where I imagined he lived or even, possibly, was kept. These rooms, in London or
the country, had an identical composite smell and appearance that seemed perfectly suited to his savage and dangerous disposition. As he bought, sold, grew, wrote about wood, they were usually
panelled and furnished with a heavy profusion of
bookcases and overwhelmingly rigid clocks that I naturally assumed were named after him. A carpet of violent irreconcilable red
and blue covered the floors. Sporting prints of hares, foxes and stags, pursued by packs of healthy men and fierce hounds into a kind of moonlit
extremis
, regimented the walls. There were
several glass cases of stuffed salmon and pike, whose faces were congealed into expressions of such murderous malevolence that I once examined them carefully to be sure that they couldn’t
escape. There were dozens of smaller clocks that fidgeted insistently behind the taller ones. There were pots of scarlet geraniums in full unwinking flower, and boxes and jars of cigars, these two
scents so confusing in my mind that for years afterwards I expected one to smell of the other. There were weighty decanters filled with whisky and port. Quantities of wood samples were always
strewn over his desk – of every colour from the palest skin, to the darkest animal fur; they were striped, whorled and figured – parched and breathless – the grain gaping for
nourishment like the dry palm of a hand, or seasoned and slippery, like a blood horse’s neck. There were small chests of shallow drawers with ivory knobs: if pulled, they sprang open with
fiendish alacrity to reveal dozens of dead beetles pinned to white blotting paper.

My grandfather was then, and was for many years, invariably accompanied by a sleek mongrel of hideous aspect. This dog was mostly black with some ill chosen splashes of white and was both shrewd
and cowardly, with a sickly smile and a strong personality. He was a careerist and a snob, wholly lacking in self-respect – in fact, he was a kind of fifth columnist in the household. His
name was Simon, but he would answer with hysterical sentiment to Si.

I can remember only two other alarming facts that confirmed my view of Grandfather. The first was that he wore an eyeglass slung on to a black-corded silk chain, and tucked into one of his
beautiful waistcoat pockets. For some mysterious reason I confused it with an eye, and felt that when he pulled the chain an eye would emerge from his pocket. The second was his gargantuan
vocal range when snoring. It sounded like a steamroller heaving itself over a humped bridge – a steadily increasing effort to the top of the hump, and then a surge of
uncontrollable freedom down the other side. The effect, even from the end of a long passage on a summer afternoon, was unnerving.

Then, one hot Sunday morning, I was taken to Rotten Row to see the Brig ride. The riders pranced, jolted, streamed up and down their strip of tanbark separated from an enormous ambling
summer-dress crowd by iron posts and railing. He appeared, riding his favourite mare, a bright chestnut called Marigold. When he saw us, he stopped, and then, suddenly, I was hoisted in front of
him on to the horse. The senses of fear and privilege were so violent that, frightened though I was, I turned speechlessly to him. His face was very close above me. He wore a pale grey bowler hat,
below which his eyes gleamed with the most keen and reassuring kindness. He had a clipped moustache that was almost white and a beautiful dark satin stock with a pearl pin in it, which rose out of
his lemon waistcoat like a dolphin with a misplaced eye. He had put me in front of him on his horse: he wasn’t frightening any more. I looked down once at the crowd, then concentrated on
clutching Marigold’s slippery shoulders.

In 1929, when I was six, the Brig bought a house for his sons, their wives and families to use for holidays. It was three and a half miles from his house, Home Place, near Staplecross, stood on
the top of a hill and was called the Beacon because beacon fires had been lit on the site since the arrival of William the Conqueror. The house was originally Gothic Victorian with wings of an
older house attached. My grandfather, who adored building projects, resuscitated it with the help of a local builder. The result wasn’t distinguished: the Gothic windows were replaced with
something more modern; the house was covered with roughcast painted white. It had eight bedrooms, two bathrooms and various other loos, a hall, a dining room – both panelled by the Brig
– a drawing room, a billiard room and a fiendishly cold little room called the
gun room where the only telephone was kept. As the house was on top of a hill, there was
almost always a wind, and no water except from various wells that tended to run dry in summer, and even when they didn’t brought forth reluctant brown water that tasted odd, and caused
concern to my mother and aunts. The lack of water was a positive advantage to us: we much preferred sea bathing and having a bucket of water chucked over us occasionally on the lawn in the
evenings. My grandfather enjoyed the drought: he adored water divining, sinking artesian wells and organizing the pumping of water from a neighbouring desolate pond in which Mr York’s –
a local farmer – fiancée was supposed to have drowned herself.

He was a good grandfather in other ways, lining us all up – there were ten of us in the end – and giving us each half a crown at Christmas. Better still, he gave us what we called
the Very, Very Old Car, an immense square vehicle, one of the earliest of its species, which he put in a field where it rotted in noble decline. Thistles grew round it up to its roof; mice nested
in its upholstery and bits of its angular body fell gradually away. We took turns to drive it as long as its steering wheel remained. It smelt of warm prayer books and was a great joy.

When I was nearly nine, in 1932, I stopped having lessons with Miss Kettle and went to the Francis Holland School in Graham Street near Sloane Square, a long ride in a 46 bus
from Notting Hill Gate. The school – I think there were about four hundred pupils – seemed to me enormous and smelt of floor polish, cottage pie and gym shoes. I don’t remember
being particularly afraid of going to school, and indeed my first week passed off smoothly. Miss Kettle had done a good job on my primary education – in some ways, it turned out, too good,
because after the first week I was moved up a form, where everybody was a year older than I, and my troubles began.

I was self-conscious, with a desperate love for my mother that I felt was unrequited and the family thought was morbid. I believed in fairies, and was stupid enough to let this be known. My
grandfather examined the school once a year in music and although I kept quiet about that, the headmistress didn’t, and constantly referred to my musical connections and capacity –
non-existent – and the form’s hostility was provided with yet more fuel.

What makes bullies, and how do they select their victims? At the time I’d no idea about this. I was too anxious to please and had considerable experience of failing. I was an unsuccessful
toady. This can ignite any bully, and I certainly did that. The form, run by three ringleaders, organized themselves into a team for making my life miserable. There were fourteen of them, and they
left nothing to chance. They hid my books or spilled ink over them. They locked me in the lavatory so that I was late for prayers or lessons. They
scattered salt all over my
lunch so that I couldn’t eat it. In the ten-minute morning break they often linked arms and ran up against me in pairs. They periodically twisted my right wrist so that writing was difficult
and painful, and apart from these practical torments, they gibed and sneered at me. The practical assaults meant, among other things, that I accumulated a large number of black marks and became
very unpopular with the staff. I was nine; the oldest girls in the school were eighteen. I spent seven hours on five days each week at school for thirty-seven weeks of the year, and since one moved
up the school as a form, this situation showed every sign of continuing for a further nine years.

The work was hard. After the seven hours at school there was a long bus ride and walk home where I had half an hour’s violin and half an hour’s piano practice, plus at least an hour
of homework before bedtime.

It didn’t occur to me that I could escape – either the teasing, as it was called, or indeed the school. I dreaded every day, but endured it all in a spiritless manner; neither
sinking to public sneaking – which I’d been taught at home was out of the question – nor rising to any kind of effective resistance. Once, goaded beyond fear, I went for them; got
through three of them before a huge Canadian girl, two years older than I, twisted my arms behind my back and kneed me in the stomach.

Once, the headmistress came into our form room and said, ‘It has come to my notice that you are bullying one of your form mates and I should like you to stand up and name them.’