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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 thecountry 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 ofbookcases 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