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I was eleven and a half when my mother decided I should be educated at home. To this end, she procured the services of Miss Cobham, who’d been her governess, and who, she
admitted, had seemed old to her then.

The point about Miss Cobham was that age couldn’t wither her: she was one of the ugliest women I have ever seen in my life – large, fat and almost blind, but infinitely gentle. She
had sparse greasy hair screwed into a tight bun, small grey eyes armoured by steel-rimmed spectacles, and a varying number of soft pale chins that meandered into her clothes, which she wore on the
Chinese principle: layers and layers of loose – and, in her case, indiscriminate – garments, which were increased or discarded according to climate. She wore thick, lazy stockings and
sensible shoes, and in spite of her bulk, she trotted everywhere – lightly, in a zigzag fashion. But she was a woman who seemed to have accepted her appearance: she ignored it – she
behaved as though it didn’t exist – and this comforting dignity left one’s mind clear for her gifts and advantages that were at least as remarkable as her appearance.

She was a woman of good intellect, encyclopedic knowledge, an active, almost buoyant intelligence, and a quality of appreciation I have never met in anyone else. As a teacher she was endlessly
patient, and with some subjects too gentle to push me into the disciplined concentration that they required of me. I spent five years with her. Lessons began at ten thirty a.m., and Miss Cobham
always arrived on the dot at twenty-five minutes past. It was my
duty to let her in, and a further duty to kiss her. I’d hold my breath as she bent down for me to brush her
soft, many-folded face with my lips. She smelt of damp, dirty clothes – of weary mushrooms, of antique sweat. Somehow I knew that this greeting was important to her so it had become a daily
hurdle to be got over somehow. In the middle of the morning she drank a large glass of hot water. She taught me until half past one and on Fridays she stayed for luncheon.

Apart from the three Rs, we read aloud the whole of Shakespeare together, at my request, and she allowed me to write, as English composition, an interminable book about a horse, and my first
play, a domestic comedy. Miss Cobham was such an encouraging audience that I often wrote her poems and stories as a kind of extra treat outside my homework. She tried to teach me English grammar
and algebra for much longer than anybody else would have done, but the former I have only ever understood by ear, and the latter in no circumstances whatever. She refused to teach me French,
although she would read French history aloud to me, translating extempore into English, and it was a long time before I realized she was doing that. She didn’t teach me music, drawing or
needlework, which were left to a number of interesting people to attempt.

I had a series of French governesses; the first was a widow who had been married to a Frenchman. She was always dressed entirely in silvery grey, had a complexion congested with self-pity, and
reeked of the violet cachous on which I imagined she lived. I could do what I liked with her by asking her about her past which she took far too seriously to tell me in French, but after a while my
lack of progress oppressed us both. By the time I seemed to know as much about her husband as she did, our relationship came to an end. She was succeeded by a hardy little Frenchwoman – like
an evergreen shrub, always the same and always dull. We went for biting winter walks in Kensington Gardens, and from her I got the impression that French conversation consisted entirely of
banalities. She only came to life when we crossed a road, when she
would shriek, ‘
Attention!
’ like a parrot. This made not the slightest difference, and I
crossed roads alone with an air of dignified British incomprehension. Either my continual danger or infuriating immunity from it depressed her and she left.

The third governess was a terrifying creature – like a brunette frog – with a fiendish energy and devotion to her task, and it was quite difficult not to learn any French from her,
but by then I’d had a good deal of practice and succeeded. She had a voice like a cheese-grater and, what seemed to me, a wholly misplaced sense of fun, and a childish passion for coloured
chalks that I quickly found could be used to deflect her.

Why, I now wonder, had I set my face against learning French? I think it was because I associated it with the dullest conversation – cliché upon cliché. The idea that there
were
interesting
books written in French that I might have learned to read was never suggested and seems not to have occurred to me. If it had, I should have had the necessary incentive, but
learning how to pass the bread and butter or make boring remarks about the weather didn’t encourage me. There was also not the slightest chance – I then felt – of my ever being
taken to France or anywhere else abroad, come to that. For these reasons, learning French seemed both difficult and pointless.

Drawing, or art, as it was optimistically called, I learned from a sad, bronchial young man who lived in a basement, invited me to get on with expressing myself, and waited with apathetic
incredulity while I tried. Very occasionally he painted a picture himself: they were usually rather angry overstatements of very simple objects – a kind of painting equivalent of ‘I
told you so’. Afternoons with him were peaceful, and as neither of us embarked upon them with any expectations other than his earning a little money and my using up a decent quantity of
materials, we were both unmoved by my lack of talent.

I was taught to ride by a flinty little Irish earl, with despairing blue eyes and a hacking cough, who was always late for lessons.
After some time he acquired a German
mistress, a tough, enigmatic blonde, who rode with us and quarrelled with him in a manner I labelled grown-up – since nobody said what they meant, but one knew what they meant by the way they
said it. This made him later than ever for lessons; to make up for that, they sometimes gave me tea at his mews stables, and cup cakes have seemed slightly raffish to me ever since.

Then I learned needlework – mostly embroidery – with Great-aunt May. She was fat, arthritic and, of course, phenomenally old, with short, straggling white hair and joyous blue eyes.
She lived with a Siamese cat, and a bony, witchlike woman called Frances, who managed to have unsatisfactory relations with this world and the next, and who cooked for her. Her room was always
boiling hot, but she didn’t observe it, and wore gigantic blue cardigans she knitted herself – but she was a beautiful needlewoman. She taught me how to frame a piece of silk and
transfer the design by pricking with pins and painting through the holes on the silk with a tiny brush; to do gold and silver thread work; to make simple kinds of lace and much else. She scorned
ready-made designs, and drew whatever she needed – birds, animals, flowers, angels, even dragons – as she or I required them. Lovely roving decorations or patterns came out of her
fingers as easily and naturally as the design for a web by a spider. I went on two afternoons a week for several years. Sometimes she read to me: Toad, Rat and Mole and a very old book about a
brownie – a Victorian fairy – but usually she talked a great deal. Her mind seemed regularly to sweep a broad circle, but I never discovered its centre. She was always making something,
and whenever she rose – with difficulty – from her chair, she left a nest of little balls of wool or silk, which I came to believe she must have laid, like a chicken. At intervals
Frances swept into the room in an indiscriminate frenzy about the spirits and the milkman, both of whom had been rude to her. My great-aunt preserved a Victorian indifference to any aspect of her
elderly servant’s social life, and although I felt vaguely that the next world was in the
basement and didn’t much like to go there, her indifference saved me from
acute anxiety.

During all these years I was taught music, which consisted chiefly of my struggling with the piano, first with my mother and then with the music mistress at my horrible day school. Miss Luker
was a tall, willowy creature, whose movements had an incongruous grace that suggested she was under water: she swayed and undulated over me in her jersey suits, reeking of the stout she drank for
her health at lunchtime and bathed in perspiration at my incompetence. I had a respect for her rages, feeling that they were honestly founded, and that without them I should not progress even the
little that I did. The lessons usually began with effusive greetings: she adored my musical Somervell grandfather and felt that – however deeply hidden – the same talent must reside in
me. However, my playing generated in her paroxysms of horror and impatience and, trying again and again, her rage would mount until, in an avalanche of furious despair, she would lose her temper
and spit. I never questioned her methods: I felt that she really cared about teaching me, and also that – unlike in the rest of my dealings with the school – I merited her fury. I
wasn’t good at the piano, and I wanted to be. Long after I’d left the school I continued with her, and our relationship staggered on, top-heavy with her temper and my incapacity, but
founded, none the less, upon a mutually honest desire to succeed.

I think I spent about a year alone with Miss Cobham before the appearance of fellow pupils. This began one morning when I came downstairs to hear my mother on the telephone
saying, ‘That will be splendid, then. They can leap along together.’ Somehow, from the tone of her voice, I could tell that she was talking about me, but ‘leap along?’,
‘
they
?’ – it all sounded more embarrassing even than it was mysterious.

‘What were you talking about?’

‘A neighbour up the road has a daughter your age and she
would like her to join the classes with Miss Cobham. Won’t that be nice?’

I wasn’t sure that it would. All my terror of people my own age who weren’t my cousins repossessed me and I didn’t reply. Over the ensuing weekend, I tried to come to terms
with the idea: she would only be one, after all. Miss Cobham would always be present; there wasn’t much that one girl could do to me. And we were certainly not going to stop reading
Shakespeare, whatever this girl thought about it. Nobody had asked me if I wanted to do lessons with other people, and nobody asked me what I felt about it. In between my Saturday ride in the Row
before breakfast – my best treat of the week – my visits to the nursery to play with Colin, my long morning of reading in the battered old leather armchair by the dining-room window, my
nervy hours of piano practice, I struggled with the way I could be ambushed by decisions and events over which I had not the slightest control. And then, out of the blue, I wondered how
she
,
the new girl, was feeling about it. Probably not good. It was far worse for her: I was in my own house and she had that, plus Miss Cobham and me, to contend with. It was up to me to be nice to her
unless or until she was horrible to me, whereupon I’d stop at once.

I need not have worried about Carol joining the class. In no time it was as though she’d always been there. She loved our Shakespeare reading and got on at once with Miss Cobham. I know
now that she and I had met when we were about seven or eight, but I don’t remember that. We were both about twelve when she joined the class, and she became my best friend. We spent as much
time together as possible, rang each other up every day, went to tea with each other, and spent hours in Ladbroke Square to which she had a key. She lived two blocks away from me, so that frequent
meeting was easy.

Her family always seemed to me rather glamorous. Her father was head of advertising in England for Shell, and was the first person to use painters to produce posters: Carol would talk about
Barnett Friedman and Ted McKnight Kauffer and other painters she knew. Her mother was small, dark and very attractive; always beautifully dressed as though she was just going to
a party. I particularly remember her lying on a sofa in a mysteriously dusky drawing room, wearing a black dress with an enormous dark red velvet sash, with one lamp illuminating her novel. She
wore the newest scents; Tweed was a favourite. Some of this grooming had brushed off on Carol, who was always immaculately dressed and learned early the trick of making quite ordinary clothes look
special. She taught me to wash my hair with egg yolks, and we made face cream of the whites. She also had a dachshund called Vernon and, not being allowed a dog, I envied her. Like me, she had a
much younger brother in the care of a large kindly nurse, but Carol didn’t live a nursery life: she had her own room on a floor above where tea on a tray was sent to us. The Beddington family
were very kind to me. When Colin, aged about two and a half, got pneumonia (long before any antibiotics) and was exceedingly ill for weeks, they had me to stay until he was out of danger.

It was with Carol I began acting pieces that I’d either written or learned by heart or improvised, and she was a wonderfully appreciative audience. It was with her that I learned I could
make people laugh, and this gave me a streak of hitherto unknown confidence. Sometimes she’d say: ‘Oh, Jane, don’t be so silly!’ We called each other ‘my dear’,
I think because we thought that this was what grown-ups did. She was less than a year older than I, but those months gave her the lien on authority. I admired her appearance. She had a beautiful
complexion, small but very lively brown eyes, and fine silky hair that curled naturally. I was pasty and my hair was lamentably straight and that was absolutely not the thing to have in those days.
Together, we discussed Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens and other books available to us, the arts generally and particularly the theatre, which neither of us had really experienced. The theatre was for
special treats.

At this point, another girl joined our class. Penelope Fletcher
was the daughter of a doctor who lived and worked in Malaysia. She had spent her early years there and Kuala
Lumpur was frequently mentioned. She, too, wanted to be an actress and together we put on a performance of duologues with Carol producing us. Penelope had seen Ruth Draper, famous then for her
one-woman shows, and introduced me to the idea of improvising sketches that we played to each other, and subsequently to grown-ups, who seemed to like them. We put on one serious production of
Shakespeare and Austen, which was enacted in our dining room. Penelope played Juliet in the balcony scene, Lady Catherine de Burgh to my Elizabeth, and the Nurse to my Juliet. It was a time of the
most hectic excitement: some kind friend of my mother’s gave me a bunch of mimosa – the first time I’d ever seen it or smelt its unique scent, and even now the sight of it reminds
me of that first heady evening.