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distance of two weeks in Switzerland, because I suddenly knew that they had nothing to do with each other. After the nursery formula of ‘You can have a sweet
after tea if you’re good,’ this was a discovery. Presents couldn’t always be equated with feelings or behaviour and were sometimes entirely unrelated. I remember looking at the
toys and finding that I’d exchange any one or the whole lot of them for my mother’s immediate return.
    I can’t now think how my mother managed to get through the days with the hiatus between breakfast and the time when she had to dress for the evening. Sometimes a friend came to lunch or
she went shopping. She went riding before breakfast in Rotten Row. There was a loom in one of the attics on the top floor, but I never saw her use it.
    She had many, some unusual, accomplishments, most of which she seemed to have relinquished by the time I became aware of her. She could bind books, weave, spin; she was a most accomplished
needlewoman – she made christening robes and little white muslin frocks for Robin with a great deal of drawn thread work and fine white cotton embroidery. She could play the piano and
recorder, and later learned to play the zither – a tortuously difficult and unrewarding instrument. She could use gold leaf and designed beautiful elaborate capital letters for a book of
Shakespeare’s sonnets that she’d made and bound for her mother when she was about twenty. She became one of the two women in London allowed to school the Life Guards’ horses at
their riding school. At one point she tried to teach me the rudiments of ballet. I remember agonizing mornings with me holding on to the bath rail while she hit my bare legs with her riding crop in
an endeavour to get me to place my feet properly in the positions. I was clumsy, terrified of displeasing her, and acutely aware that I was doing so; I became paralysed with stupidity and fear.
    When I was about seven, something happened that impressed me very deeply. We were walking with our mother one springevening along a narrow pavement on one side of which was
an enormously high wall that enclosed Campden Hill reservoir. At intervals there were gas lamps, which were lit each evening by a man with a mysterious long pole. The street was empty, except for a
shabby little man about half-way down it. He was leaning with his back to the wall. As we approached, he took a few uncertain steps away from us, put his hand to his head and pitched forward
straight into the road. My mother told us to stay where we were, and went up to the man. We watched him speechlessly; he was sitting now in the kerb – rubbing his head with his hands. He was
a pale old man with dirty white hair. My mother helped him to his feet and then gave him some money: his trousers were round on his legs and he had crabbed, nervous hands that he kept putting in
and out of his pockets. Eventually, he trembled off down the road and disappeared in the soft grey evening.
    What was the matter with him? Was he very ill? He was just very weak from being so hungry, my mother said. She had given him half a crown and he would buy some food and then he would be all
right, she added, and I suddenly saw her looking at me and didn’t believe her. The idea of somebody fainting with hunger was as new as it was horrible: I had no idea how many meals could be
bought with half a crown, but when the old man had eaten them what would he do then? He might faint again when there was nobody to give him anything. Why had we not given the old man more or,
better still, taken him home where there were meals for ever? I don’t remember a satisfactory answer to my questions, and the argument – then presented – that there were other old
men or people in the same predicament simply widened the horror that this first impingement of the world outside my life exposed.
    I don’t remember having any serious friends before we moved to Lansdowne Road. There were