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children’s tea parties – usually near Christmas – but I dreaded them: the milk
tasted different and I was frightened of pulling crackers. A nanny stood behind each child’s chair – like a footman – and they talked to one anotherwhile the
children ate silently, or wept because they weren’t enjoying themselves. The first friend I do remember having was a charismatic girl, several years older than I, called Nicola. She told me
that she could do magic, and one day, when we were walking to Kensington Gardens, she told me that she’d lost her doll. ‘But I can get it back any time I like.’ How could she do
that? She stopped, selected a stone, and stamped on it. ‘There! Now the doll will come back.’ The next day there she was with the doll. I was most humbly impressed, knowing I could
never do anything like that.
    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 therewere 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