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stepmother, Nina, in London. This violent translation from a Hampshire village to the city was at first desperately unwelcome to me. My father was at sea; the sprawling paradise of garden and wooded lanes I was accustomed to had become dirty crowded streets; the windows in Nina’s large, cluttered second-storey rooms revealed only dark roofs and chimneys. Later I thought them beautiful, but not at first. The only animals here seemed to be cats, mice, sooty pigeons and bony street horses. All these I liked well enough, especially the cats, but they could not compare with the village menagerie of dogs, hens, rabbits, cows, sheep, and more, now lost to me.
    Nina had been the widow of an actor before she married my father, and an actress herself in her youth. Looking back I can only imagine they were one of those odd pairings war tends to bring about. My father was coolly rational, energetic, meticulously neat and self-disciplined.Nina was sentimental, warm and famously untidy: her brown hair was always escaping from the bright turbans she wound carelessly about it. Her face reminded me of a gentle pony’s. My father needed her gaiety as she needed his steadiness. Even so, their mutual happiness was no doubt aided by the war and his naval position, which kept them frequently apart. But they were happy, I believe.
    Nowadays I think it could not have been easy for her to have a strange child thrust into her life. She managed by enlisting the help of her many friends—artists, actors, writers, musicians, both male and female: the demi-monde. At first I was shy of them, but soon became fascinated by their talk, their colourful ways. Under their good-natured, irregular care, I discovered a way of life entirely to my liking, which unfortunately lasted not much more than a year. Boney was captured and sent to Elba, and my father came home and noticed that the education I was deriving from this rackety company was rather too broad. He had earned a thousand pounds in prize money when his ship the Resolute captured the Belle Isle ; it would pay for my schooling in Dublin.
    ‘Dublin!’ cried Nina. ‘Are there no such establishments in London?’ She was a Londoner through and through, and by then she had taught me to love the city. She had once toured the provinces playing Lady Wishfort in The Way of the World , and shuddered at the memory. Yet she could not dissuade my father. The widow of his best friend, a fellow Post Captain, was struggling to keep body and soul together by running a ladies’ academy in Dublin, and there I must go.
    The long journeys that followed four times a year for me, across England and the Irish Sea, seem in memory to have taken place mostly at night and in winter. But all through the rattling cold, the boredom and fear, I always felt a current of humming excitement: the promise of new sights and places.
    Waterloo came when I was twelve, and the following years were lean ones. My father, like so many naval men, was stranded ashore on half-pay because the fleet was in tatters after the decades of fighting. By the time I was fifteen he could no longer afford the school, andassuming I was sufficiently educated in any case, he called me back to London.
    But I had fallen in love—like half the girls and teachers at the Academy—with Thomas Adair, our drawing master. An older girl nudged me and nodded at him in Church a few days before our lessons began. He was lean, wolfishly handsome, with Byronically hollowed cheeks, dark hair and a pointed chin. I believed at once the rumours she told me: he was half Irish, half Russian; he had escaped from the burning of Moscow by the skin of his teeth, and later fled a splendid career in London on account of a scandal involving the wife of some eminent person.
    At our first lesson he loped into the room carrying a basket, set a white linen cloth in casual folds on a small table in the centre of the room while we watched and giggled, and laid out upon it lemons and grapes.