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Cousin Gertrude was a lady of great dignity. Children were as distinct a species as might be the shooting dogs or servants. I remember that when she spoke to us it was with a distant –
though kindly – sense of duty, rather like royalty singling out one of the troops under inspection. She would ask us questions so general as to be idiotic: we didn’t wish to tell her
anything and she didn’t wish to hear it, but we did and she did.

Cousin Freddie was jovially altogether out of our orbit, reciting the Latin names for flowers, which simply meant that we didn’t know what on earth he was talking about. My mother admired
Cousin Gertrude very much. She was, my mother said, a wonderful organizer, always answered letters by return of post and knew where everything was. She had short, iron-grey hair, a fine complexion,
and wore horn-rimmed spectacles that, naturally, she never lost. The house ran like clockwork.

She was Uncle Mont’s sister, I discovered much later, and their mother, Cousin Susie, lived in a large dark red house on Campden Hill with a wilting companion. Once, when her horses were
lame, she was said to have resorted to a motor taxicab. When she reached her destination and was handed out, she asked, ‘How much?’ The cabbie said one and nine pence. ‘No, no
– I mean for the
cab
. I should like to buy it.’ To me, this was on a par with daffodils by the ton.

Years later, when I had my daughter, she came to pay me a formal call after my ‘lying in’. She must have been nearly ninety by then.

We also went occasionally for holidays with another cousin in Scotland. She was French, a widow – I think she’d been married to yet another Balfour, and we always
called her Cousin Yolande. She lived near Montrose, first in a tall dark grey house called Duninald, and later, when her son married, in a much cosier little house on a sunny bank and further from
the town. I remember once going to Montrose by boat from the Thames and paying, I think, my first visit to the cinema where
The Informer
was being shown. It seemed extremely menacing and
foggy to me, but the grown-ups said it was very good. One summer one of Cousin Yolande’s nieces from Paris was there. She was called Henriette and was very pretty with abundant, carelessly
dressed hair and lustrous brown eyes. Her clothes seemed to me the height of glamour; she was seventeen and I particularly remember her in a long white organdie dress for a ball, with a brilliant
green sash round her tiny waist. I remember thinking that if she’d been English, the sash would have been a soppy pale pink or blue. We shared a bedroom. She had beautiful manners and was
nice to me although I was at least six years younger, but her English was minimal and my French non-existent, so intimacy was doubly restricted.

Cousin Yolande was both gay and cosy; she wasn’t unlike a very large tabby kitten. She took us to castles where there were Highland cattle and ceilings with fragmentary murals, and
marvellous raspberries for tea. In one, I remember being shown Bonnie Prince Charlies’s wig.

Once our mother took Robin and me climbing in Westmorland – the county her father came from and where a good many Somervells still lived, in Kendal and thereabouts. We climbed every day,
beginning with the Lion and the Lamb, and Silver Howe, and graduating to Scafell Pike and eventually Helvellyn. Our mother made us climb for half an hour, rest for ten minutes and then go on. We
used to get tired, but she said we’d get our second wind if we kept trying. I’d no idea what this meant, until I was on Striding Edge on Helvellyn and suddenly I felt I could walk for
miles and
would never get tired. It was a wonderful feeling: a great rush of new energy and the sense of lightness and triumph. Robin and I used to collect unfortunate beetles
from our walks, put them in matchboxes and attempt to race them in the evening.

I remember the enormous pleasure, once, of taking off nearly all of our clothes and trying to come down a mountain in a ghyll. The ice-cold water, the small sudden falls, the beautiful little
crystal pools and the sound of it hurrying on as effortless and continuous as a cat’s purr enchanted me. Sometimes we’d come upon a waterfall too steep for us, and we had to walk down
beside it, our feet so paralysed with cold that we didn’t feel the sharp shale or scratchy plants. Eventually we were made to stop, put on our jerseys and eat Kendal Mint Cake – hard
white peppermint sugar fudge that my mother said our cousin Howard Somervell had taken with him up Everest with his friend Mallory.

I think my mother enjoyed all these holidays away from Sussex: she certainly liked visiting relations, and the mountain-climbing expeditions suited her active nature, which seemed to find too
little outlet in London or Sussex. But the long walks were also designed for our benefit and I remember being happier and more at ease with her on those occasions.

In the evenings she played cards with us. Once we went to visit my grandfather’s two sisters, Aunts Annie and Amy: they were called Tannie and Tamie and emerged from their cottage to greet
us, two tiny grey Victorian dolls who spoke in little mewing whispers and smiled so much that their eyes became thin crescents. Their faces, when I was told to kiss them, were as soft as snow.

When I was ten, my mother told me that she was going to have a baby. A sister? I passionately wanted a sister. But she said no one could know whether it would be; it might as easily be a
brother. Great preparations had to be made for its arrival. The roof of the attic floor of our house in London was raised to make a large, airy nursery, and I helped my mother to paint it – a
rather livid light green. I got more and more excited about
this baby’s arrival, and made my mother promise I should be the first to see it.

Alas for the treachery of grown-ups. One sunny day in March, on my eleventh birthday, my mother told me I’d been invited to spend the day with my paternal grandparents whose house was in
Regent’s Park. I loved my aunt Ruth, who lived there, particularly, and was deposited at 15 Chester Terrace by my father on his way to work; it turned out that I was also to stay the night.
The next morning after breakfast the telephone rang, and my aunt announced that I had a brother.

I was appalled. How could I get home in time to be the first to see him? They’d take me home in the afternoon, they said. I remember storming down the stairs to the front door and only
just being prevented from opening it. My aunt caught me, whereupon I burst into such racking sobs of frustration and despair that she took me home then and there in a taxi. I rushed upstairs to my
mother’s bedroom where she was lying with a basket beside her. In it was a tiny baby, his face the colour of a pale tomato, his wispy damp hair growing in all directions. I loved him on
sight. What was his name? He was to be called Colin.

My Somervell grandfather, Mo, had been the youngest in a family of nine. His parents hadn’t been able to afford music lessons for their younger children, so he listened
to an older brother’s lessons, afterwards practising on his own. He subsequently became responsible for any standard of musicianship in teachers throughout the country: before him, anybody
could teach any kind of music with little or no knowledge or capacity. He taught me about key signatures, so that from having been a torturing mystery, they were suddenly as easy to understand as
words on a page.

As I grew older, my grandfather changed: he was still very old, but he was otherwise less misty as a person, and life with him became more definite and interesting. At the same time, a streak of
conspiracy crept in between us against my grandmother. The
underlying difficulty was that she had a great sense of occasion with little opportunity to exercise it and he, in a
mild and innocent manner, had a great sense of opportunity for which there was almost no occasion. A granddaughter increased his range: we went to the zoo, where we both ate ice cream ‘in a
vulgar manner, in public’ and to Kew, where after proper consideration of the flora, we rushed to the fair by Kew Bridge and had double rides on the merry-go-round. I shall always remember
him on a piebald pony that had a painted rollicking sneer on its face, upright, being borne on the crest of each rich, tinny wave of music that pulsed from the centre of the machine, his face set
with pleasure.

On the way back in the 27 bus he would tell me jokes that seemed the last word in wit, his voice squeaky with impending dénouement, tears pouring down his face when he laughed –
which was even more than I did. When we got back from these excursions to tea with Grandmother in her chair, we’d always had a lovely time, but we selected the more sedate pleasures to relate
to her, our vulgar giggles and undignified behaviour remaining a tacit secret.

Only once did he let me down. ‘Come up to my study, little dear,’ he said one day, and then on the stairs, ‘I have something for you.’ His study was dark, bleak and
stuffy. There was a desk, a piano, and a huge picture of Brahms who, from the way in which all spoke of him, I confused for many years with God. His stature was abjectly diminished when my
grandparents moved house, when he was described as ‘Bearded Gent in Beaded Frame’ by the removal men.

Here my grandfather wrote his music, spending long hours in mysterious silence, while downstairs my grandmother, with a rubber-tipped stick and painful, pointed shoes, creaked about in an
exaggerated and mournful
pianissimo
. She treated his composition as a mild but chronic illness; his attacks of music could be gauged like a disease – his violin concerto went on for so
many weeks that it was rather like whooping cough.

On this occasion, with a grin that meant some private treat, he said, ‘Do you like liquorice?’ Oh, yes, and I could see that it was something one wouldn’t
eat in the drawing room. I was thinking of delicious striped sweets, but he pulled a great stick, like a piece of park railing, out of his drawer and chipped two pieces off the end of it with his
penknife. ‘Pop it in.’ It was violently bitter, and tasted of all the medicine I’d ever had in my life. ‘It’s
real
liquorice,’ he said, with pride. I
thanked him, endured it solemnly for about five minutes and finally hid it in my handkerchief. Afterwards, when he offered me more, I managed to refuse without his knowing how poisonous it had
seemed: he was so extremely gentle, deprecating in his approach, that I couldn’t bear to hurt his feelings. Thus when he gave me a stuffed lion called Marco, a present I felt far too young
for me, I was meekly enthusiastic, until I found that he owned one himself – called Jeremy – and was ashamedly devoted to it. Out of sheer devotion to him, I accepted the presence of
both lions.

In spite of digressions, I am still not much older than eleven. The summer after leaving Francis Holland School, there were long restorative holidays. As they grew from being boring little
babies into children who could play games – mostly invented by ourselves – my cousins became more interesting to me. There was a grass tennis court, and we all started playing as soon
as they were large enough to hold a racquet. Eventually my father and uncles had a squash court built. Children were allowed to use it whenever the grown-ups didn’t want to play. We played,
however hot it was, until we dropped.

Our parents sometimes took turns to look after us while others went on holiday, and I particularly remember one Christmas when my parents were left with all ten of us. This really meant my
mother was
in
sole
loco parentis
, as my father could only join her at weekends. One Friday evening he arrived with a barrel of oysters and some champagne and announced that he was
taking her to the cinema in Hastings before this feast. While they were away,
the house caught fire: the heavy oak beams over the fireplace in the billiard room began to
smoulder, sending quantities of smoke up the chimney into the bedroom above it, in which slept two small cousins and their nurse. When the nurse went to retire, she found the room filled with
smoke. The alarm was raised; we were all got out of the house and sat, bundled in blankets, on the lawn. The Fire Brigade arrived and, eventually, the fire was vanquished, and we were sent back to
our beds. There was a delicious smell of smouldering wood in the house and people gave us hot drinks; we enjoyed it all hugely.

About then my parents returned. After the firemen had been refreshed with tips and tea, my father, determined to continue the treat he had arranged for my mother, opened the champagne. After a
glass, my mother began to open the oysters. Almost at once, her hand slipped and she drove the oyster knife into the cleft between her first finger and thumb, and the telephone rang. It was an
uncle and aunt in Switzerland wanting to know if all was well. My father assured them heartily that, indeed, all was well, and they accepted this. He said afterwards that he couldn’t bear to
spoil their holiday. In fact, if the nurse had stayed up any later, two of my cousins would have died from the smoke.

The next morning we surveyed the billiard room – inches deep in ashy water and many of the complete sets of bound
Punch
were damaged.

Christmas holidays were full of games, beginning with Monopoly at about six thirty in the morning. We played in our freezing bedrooms, blue with cold. There was, of course, no heating in the
house other than the reluctant fires on the ground floor. Between tea and supper we played a fearful game called Torchlight Ogres. This involved turning off all the lights, except in the drawing
room where the parents lurked – it maddened the servants who were trying to lay dinner or put babies to bed and I don’t know why we were allowed to get away with it. There was an
ancient gramophone, the kind you wound up, and we had about six records
that we played again and again. ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’, ‘The
Grasshoppers’ Dance’, ‘The Gold and Silver Waltz’ were three that I especially remember, and later, Noël Coward singing ‘Don’t Put Your Daughter On The
Stage Mrs Worthington’. We played rummy, and pelmanism, and Adverbs and Head, Body and Legs, and charades, and as we grew older, I produced plays, bits of Shakespeare, and once a play devised
by everyone for the benefit of the Howard grandparents. Uncle John played his father, who sat with tears of laughter, enjoying being taken off. There were trips to Hastings to spend our Christmas
book tokens – it was when I began collecting Dickens, but I was also extremely keen on ponies and riding and bought books about horses. We went for long, freezing bicycle rides in the steep
lanes surrounding us. When we were too young to rebel, we were forced into dreary walks with nurses – on
roads
in our
wellingtons
.