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Doing It

You may not have a personal memory of the 1950s – many of you will not have been born yet, nor have grown up then, as I did – but I’m sure you can nevertheless call to mind pictures or photographs of the period, possibly in old newspapers or magazines, especially the advertisements. Housewives in frilly pinnies with syrupy smiles on their faces, waiting for their hubbies to come home from the office and holding out plates of freshly baked biscuits. Advertisements for vanishing cream and Brylcreem. Perms. Twinsets.

We wore pull-ons or girdles to hold our tummies in (the sort of underwear that Woolies sells today, only now they’re called shapers or firmers).

We adored British pop stars like Cliff Richard and Adam Faith and American crooners like Nat King Cole; and we danced to the inimitable Buddy Holly.

We read novels like Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien would later be one of my university lecturers), Steinbeck’s East of Eden, Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Some of these books became classics; many are still set-works in schools and universities around the world today. One of my most prized possessions is a copy of Things Fall Apart that Chinua inscribed personally for me when we met in Nigeria many years later.

On tiny black-and-white television sets we watched American shows such as I Love Lucy, Lassie and Bonanza and, on BBC, What’s My Line? And we all perved over the young David Attenborough in Zoo Quest.

We went to ‘the pictures’ (think ‘bioscope’ in South Africa in the same period) and saw The Seven Samurai, High Noon, Ben Hur, A Streetcar Named Desire (with the young Marlon Brando), Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Vertigo and, of course, Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot. Over the decades since, the 50s have been brought back to life on both small and big screens with fair regularity – in the Indiana Jones movies, for example, West Side Story, Brooklyn, The Godfather, M*A*S*H and Call the Midwife.

Well, it was like all that in the 50s – and at the same time it wasn’t.

Sex was a word hardly ever uttered.

If a movie had a scene in it with a man, a woman and a bed, the British film censors decreed that if the man and woman were on the bed at the same time, the man always had to have one foot firmly on the floor.

Sales of The Kama Sutra doubled.

There was high moral outrage in Britain when the movie Quo Vadis, which was about a tough Roman commander and a beautiful Christian hostage, was released in 1951. Why? Because on the soundtrack the crunching of the Christian’s bones by the lions in the Roman amphitheatre was clearly heard.

This was unacceptable and pious music was inserted instead.

At Lincoln College, Oxford University, where Malcolm, my first husband, was a student, there was a handwritten notice (in copperplate of course) warning the gentlemen scholars that if they entertained a lady in their rooms, the bed must be put outside the door. Which was actually impossible as the rooms were situated up and down a twisting, very narrow fifteenth-century staircase. I wonder if the college authorities really believed that sex could only take place on a bed?

But these were halcyon days to be a student. For one thing fourteen years of food rationing finally ended in Britain, at midnight on 4 July 1954, when restrictions on meat and bacon were lifted. Until then, since 1940, a few months into World War 2, people were assigned ration books, with coupons that we could exchange for food and clothes. The Germans cut off food supplies that had traditionally come in by sea so we had to manage on a lot less than we’d been used to. It seems hard to believe now but we were allowed one egg a week, 50 gm of tea, butter and cheese, 225 gm of sugar and, every four months, 450 gm of jam and 350 gm of sweets. There were no soft drinks such as Coke back then, but we did get 3 pts (1 800 ml) of milk a week, which sometimes dropped to 2 pts (1 200 ml). As the war dragged on, food became even less readily available. Bread was added to the ration and our sweets ration was halved. There was little or no petrol available either, so we walked or cycled everywhere – my family couldn’t afford a car anyway so this didn’t affect us overmuch.

So it was by the time we were students in the early 1950s, the first generation of British working-class kids to go to university on grants and scholarships, we were in seventh heaven. We could eat what we liked, overdose on chocolate and chips if we liked, and buy all the clothes we could afford. Ration coupons had only allowed us to buy one completely new set of clothes once a year. Luckily, Doris (my mother) was a dressmaker so my sister Rita and I always had the latest fashions, even if one of my very best party dresses as a child was made out of curtain lining. No wonder I empathised with Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind when she made a dress out of the antebellum mansion’s green velvet dining room curtains.

When I went up to university, students on the whole were happy, content and fully understood that although we were on scholarships it would be necessary to find a job every vacation in order to keep ourselves supported because the money we got from government only covered lodgings during term time, fees and books.

A couple of years later, when Britain was riding high on the post-war economic boom, Harold Macmillan, Britain’s then prime minister (whom I was to meet some years later, in 1960, on the occasion of Nigeria’s independence), was reinforcing the message to the whole British public with his famous declaration that ‘most of our people have never had it so good’.

Scholarships, however, were not so easy to come by. Only one per cent of the British population went to university, and it was a strict meritocracy.

At age seventeen I was lucky enough to be interviewed in Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, the county where I lived, by the county education officer, John Newsom, who was later knighted for his services to British education and had a school and several streets named after him. My A Levels had been pretty good but not brilliant; nonetheless I had been selected for a personal interview with him to see if I was university material and eligible for a county scholarship.

I’ve always loved English literature, the poetry and majesty of words, the nuances and rhythms of language. I’d read at least four or five books a week since a young child and I still do. Sometimes more.

Mr Newsom’s first question to me was:

‘Which poets do you enjoy?’

And I was away. Two hours later our conversation had covered everything from AA Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh and his Christopher Robin poems, to WH Auden, Dylan Thomas, Enid Blyton and Shakespeare.

I remember that conversation well and the kind, clever man who was nevertheless incisively probing my mind as we laughed and shared likes and dislikes. I owe him a huge debt because he awarded me my scholarship, just as I owe a huge debt to my sister Rita, my mother Doris, and to my amazing O and A Levels English teacher, the Hon Gwen, who fostered my love of learning.

Unbeknown to me at the time, somewhere in London Malcolm had just won a scholarship to Oxford but had postponed going up so as to complete his compulsory national service first. And somewhere in the Mountains of Mourne in Northern Ireland, Alan (my second husband) was preparing to sit for his university scholarship exam.

Our paths were to become inextricably crossed.

I grew up first in the East End of London. Then World War 2 happened. Rita and I were evacuated from London to the countryside along with hundreds of thousands of other urban children. In September 1939, I aged four and Rita aged six, with gas masks in brown cardboard boxes tied with string around our necks, each clutching the one small attaché case we were allowed packed with a few clothes, with brown paper parcel labels with our names on tied through a buttonhole on our pink homemade coats, were kissed goodbye by our parents at London’s St Pancras Station, put on a train with straw on the floor and literally sent into the unknown.

I remember how at school we used to practise putting on those suffocating gas masks, which smelt of rubber, and then practising hiding under our desks for when the Nazis came.

Rita and I had never been away from home. My sister, always the drama queen, even at six, told me we were going to the ends of the earth. I believed her.

Much has been written since on the effects of evacuation on parents and children.

I asked my mother much later in life how she could possibly have given up her children in this callous and heartbreaking way.

‘We’d seen pictures of horrifying bombing raids in China and Spain,’ was her reply. ‘The government dropped leaflets from the sky warning us what could happen to our children if the Nazis came. You were going to be raped and killed. We had no choice.’

The statistics are astonishing. In just four days 4 000 trains transported nearly a million and a half evacuees out of London and it all went like clockwork. Not one casualty or mishap was reported. It was later that both parents and children suffered what became known as post-traumatic stress syndrome.

I have a superb memory. This is not a boast but a fact. Any of my friends, fans or family will attest to it. But of that six months I spent as an evacuee somewhere in the damp fens of East Anglia I have no memory at all. I suppose a shrink would call it classic block-out. All I remember was the noise at the station, the weeping and wailing, the huge railway engine puffing clouds of steam and that I was quite excited to be wearing my Sunday-best coat.

In September 2017 I was travelling in Croatia when I got a WhatsApp from my granddaughter Alice, from school in Johannesburg:

Granny, we’re learning about evacuees in History. Do you know anything about them?

Wow! I thought. I’m history!

But Doris was not one to let ‘that little twerp Hitler’ break up her family or stop her in her tracks. Aided and abetted by my mother, my father Dick found a job as a welder at De Havilland’s Aircraft factory in rural Hertfordshire away from London. A rented house was found nearby, and Doris and Dick soon rescued their children from what Rita later described as ‘Cold Comfort Farm on steroids’ and we were a united family again.

It was a good thing we had got out of London. The following September saw the beginning of the Blitz, Hitler’s attempt to annihilate London by carrying out the most savage bombing campaign the world had ever seen of that and other cities in England. The period of intense bombing continued until the following May, when Hitler finally decided to move his bombers east to get ready for Germany’s invasion of Russia.

On 7 September 1940 and for 57 consecutive days thereafter London was bombed continuously, day or night, and thousands of innocent civilians were killed. On the last night of the Blitz alone, 11 May 1941, over 3 000 people died.

Our small family – Doris, Dick, Grandfather, Rita and I – missed all that.

We lived happily all together in the countryside in a small house with three bedrooms, a dining room, lounge, kitchen and bathroom. The house backed onto a wild wood where brown rabbits, nightingales and hedgehogs lived. In spring it was carpeted with bluebells, and bushes and trees burst forth – crimson rhododendron flowers and fragile white cherry blossom; in autumn we picked blackberries.

My grandfather was a Swede from Götland, an island that sits largely in the sea between the mainland of Sweden and Lithuania, and had once been the centre and pivot of all Baltic trade and queen of the Hanseatic League. At twelve, he had run away from home and become a cabin boy on a sailing ship.

In our teens Rita and I would find the house he had grown up in, in Ronehamn, a small village on Götland’s east coast, and talk to a rheumy-eyed, very old man who as a child had known Johann and helped him run away to sea.

Thereafter Grandfather John Frederick Ahlquist spent most of his life on sailing ships and to his last days was suspicious of any other kind of vessel, because his were the days of ‘wooden ships and iron men’. Not, as he would grunt, like today, ‘of iron ships and wooden men’.

He had sailed around the world many times. He’d deserted ship and trekked across the Canadian wilderness in bitter winter. He had been becalmed in the Sargasso Sea in a vast patch of the Atlantic Ocean named for its free-floating seaweed called Sargassum and stewed his boots for food. He had had his left foot prematurely shortened by a frisky shark, sailed with Joseph Conrad before the mast, and finally had his wanderings cut short by a fall from the ship’s crow’s nest during a storm while in Canada’s Gulf of St Lawrence. He somehow ended up as a patient at the Greenwich Hospital on the bank of the Thames, created in 1692 as the Royal Hospital for Seamen. We never actually did find out how the Swedish captain of a sailing ship ended up there, but it was while he was there that he met, fell in love with and married a nurse named Edith Ashburn, who nursed him back to health. Edith, my grandmother, came from a long line of Yorkshire witches. (You can read all about him, and my mother Doris, in my earlier book Doing It with Doris.)

When Doris and Dick went out dancing or to work ‘dos’ during those war days, Rita and I would be left in Grandad’s care. Problem was that Rita, she of the ever fertile imagination, had convinced me that Grandad was a German spy, irrevocable proof being his slightly foreign accent and a small badge he wore in his lapel. While Grandad sat unsuspectingly by the fire on a winter’s night, puffing on his pipe and dreaming of rascally mates and brutal skippers, alluring South Sea maidens and dainty geisha girls, I, spurred on by Rita, would be creeping up on him to see if he was transmitting secret messages on a hidden radio set in his room. I later found out, rather disappointingly, that the mysterious badge merely announced him a paid-up member of his trade union.

My own wanderlust grew quickly. Our house was often crowded with Grandad’s friends. There was Uncle Christian, my godfather, a snowy-haired Dane married to one of Grandad’s twin sisters, Julia, who ran a Mission for Seamen in London’s Chinatown. He would tell us tales not only of his own adventures but also of his Viking ancestors. It was from him that I learned of the pirate king Olaf Tryggvason, and of the warrior poet Gunnlaug Ormstungu, who, although brave, was always getting into trouble because of his hasty temper and biting tongue.

Uncle Christian told us about the thunder god Thor and his famous hammer, of the Tree of Life, Yggdrasil, whose topmost branches penetrate heaven while its roots are deep in hell. And for weeks after first hearing the story of the ship Naglfar, like Uncle Christian’s ancestors Rita and I didn’t dare cut our nails in case they would provide building material for this vessel of doom made of nail parings which comes to help destroy the earth when the Twilight of the Gods is approaching. (I suppose these stories, among other things, prompted me to study Old Norse at university.)

Uncle Oscar, a Norwegian ship’s carpenter, was another regular visitor. He handcrafted the most beautiful sewing-box for Doris of glossy brown cherry wood that sits on my dressing table today. (The four granddaughters are already fighting over who gets it after I go to Valhalla.) Although he didn’t speak much English, Uncle Oscar taught me to play chess. I put the fact that I’m useless at chess down to miscommunication, although I know in my heart I’m much too impatient to be a chess player.

I was, however, in later life, very good at the game of losing chess, where the idea is to lose your pieces as quickly as possible. I used to play it in the common-room of my university with Hamish Macgregor, a young red-headed Scot I fancied quite madly at the time and to whose soft Highland accent and wandering hands I almost succumbed.

One Christmas a bunch of Russian sailors somehow found my grandfather at our little house on Firwood Avenue (where there wasn’t a fir in sight) and I remember that Grandad and they all spoke Russian together, got very drunk, and sang sea shanties well into Boxing Day morning.

Nurtured in an atmosphere of seasoned travellers on the one hand, and would-be but repressed travellers on the other – Doris had not yet started her own journeys that would take her from head-hunters in New Guinea and a sheep farm in New Zealand, to a bar in the Bronx and a harem in Saudi Arabia – it was inevitable that I, too, would want to travel.

My first proposed destination was China. A prolific reader from the age of four, a highly romantic novel about Marco Polo’s adventures had come my way via the local library. I slept and dreamed of far Cathay and the mysteries of the Orient.

But how was I to get there?

I resolved to become a missionary. I could think of no other way of getting myself to China.

My family was at first surprised and then began to feel a little proud. Although we were of adventurous daredevil stock, so far there had been no religious pioneers in the family. I was unique. Other little girls wanted to become Florence Nightingale, Shirley Temple or the Forces’ Favourite singer Vera Lynn. At tea parties and family gatherings, at bus stops and on train journeys, as I stood plumply and smugly under tight ringlets (engineered nightly by Doris with curling rags), I was introduced as ‘This is the youngest. She wants to be a missionary.’

As startled amusement gave way to a kind of awe, I could hear the cheers of the heathens as with tears in their eyes they forsook their own gods for a Christian one.

From then on I was not quite like other children. I would stand apart from their childish games with an air of bemused tolerance and a contemplative face that I had practised for hours in front of my bedroom mirror. I reaped material benefits from my precocious spirituality. Kind aunts, uncles and friends, fearful of the hazards and privations of my intended destiny, heaped luxuries on me while they could – an extra couple of ounces of butter, some lemon sherbets, a bar of Pears soap.

But the end came, as I somehow knew it would.

Another novel based loosely on the Orient but set in London’s seedy Limehouse district (where even as I read it Aunt Julia was administering boiled sausages and noodles to Chinese seamen) was the story of arch-fiend Dr Fu Manchu, whose machinations had caused world turmoil and the undoing of many a virtuous maiden. Faced with these unsuspected dangers, I abandoned my missionary plan.

My family took a long time to forgive me and from that day to this I have wisely never planned a future but have ricocheted from one happening to another.

Only my father understood. A funny and gentle man, Dick advised me to join the Girl Guides.

My father was the rock to which all our unstable boats were tethered. Content and complete, he was the only one of the family never to leave England and who never wanted to. He was an orphan from South Shields in the north-east of England, and was brought up by a coal miner and his wife. He himself went down the mines to work when he was only twelve. He never knew who his mother was, but had a prized army document in his possession awarding his father, Private James Wood of the Coldstream Guards, an award for gallantry in World War l for bringing in wounded soldiers from the battlefield at the Somme.

My son Simon has that document in his possession today.

In between fostering and feeding our pets, which ranged from rabbits, hedgehogs – Doris used to put out a saucer of milk for one hedgehog who came up from the wood to sip from it – newts and guinea pigs, to a beloved dog called Peter and a feisty white goat called Salome, Rita and I were growing up.

By the way, we were very unsuccessful with our rabbits. Doris had originally bought a couple of them for a birthday present for me – unimaginatively named (by me) Darby and Joan. But Doris also had an eye to future rabbit stews. Food, remember, was very scarce and bunny-huggers hadn’t even been born. Darby and Joan multiplied at an alarming rate, but both they and their offspring found their way out of the hutch into the wood. After some time the sandy-coloured wild rabbits that lived in the wood got lots of new fluffy little black-and-white brothers and sisters. Although it was obvious that our fertile pair was still at it, Doris had to abandon her culinary plans.

Rita was possessed of two abiding motives: she was an incurable romantic and she wanted to be a teacher. Consequently, while other children were romping through Cowboys and Indians and Cops and Robbers, Rita and I moved languidly through our wild wood as jungle princesses with glorious exotic names such as Astarte and Bulbutha. The game always ended with me being carried back to civilisation and nuptial bliss by a strong young hunter or prince, while Rita remained supreme and unchallenged in her jungle domain. She was always determined that I would be married but that she would remain single. She was wrong on one count.

When not bedecked in feathers and leaves, Rita would be assuming her second role, that of mentor. She would sit me high up in a tall tree in our wood on a branch I couldn’t get down from unaided, and make me play spelling bees and school. Thus at the tender age of seven I would sit dutifully on my branch chanting out words like d-i-a-r-r-h-oe (diphthong) –a. If I left out the diphthong I would have to re-spell it. I had the most wonderful vocabulary of difficult words and could astonish friends and family with a facile use of such words as pneumonia, psittacosis and parallel. (I wonder what Rita would have made of text talk today?)

One evening the vicar came round to deliver the parish magazine. My mother courteously enquired after the health of his wife, who was known to be of a sickly nature.

‘Not too well,’ the vicar replied, shaking his shiny bald head.

‘Oh,’ I said, before beautifully and slowly delivering my latest word. ‘Do you think it could be gon-orr-hoea?’

The vicar went purple, my mother looked horrified but then suppressed a giggle, and after that copies of the parish magazine came only by post.

At Christmas and other festive occasions Rita and I would entertain the family with plays. Emerging from behind the lounge curtains, we would recite everything from Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene and the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, to the first few lines of ‘To be, or not to be …’ or ‘Jabberwocky’ – ‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves …’

All this precocious erudition changed my life. I was five when I went to my first convent school and could already read exceptionally well for my age. On the first day all the new children were asked to recite any little poems we knew for the Mother Superior, who was grading us on the outcome. I recited fully, with great expression as coached by Rita, hardly understanding one word of what I was saying, Gertrude’s speech from Hamlet describing Ophelia’s watery death.

There is a willow grows aslant a brook,

That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream:

There with fantastic garlands did she come,

Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples,

That liberal shepherds give a grosser name;

But our cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them …

The Mother Superior was convinced she had a prodigy on her hands and placed me in a class two years in advance of my age. Consequently, I was to take my matric at fifteen, go up to university at just eighteen, and be married at 20.

Had I recited ‘I don’t like beetles, though I’m sure they’re very good / I don’t like porridge, tho’ my Mummy says I should …’, I would never have met Malcolm or Alan, never have gone to Nigeria, never have come to South Africa, never have had four children and nine grandchildren along the way, or would not now be sitting at my desk in Johannesburg telling you the story of my life.

Have you ever wondered (and of course you have) about the milestones in your life which at the time didn’t seem to signify anything important at all? That phone call, that meeting with somebody new, that moment of electricity when your eyes met a stranger’s, that careless remark a friend let slip, that opportunity you never took?

Maybe it’s best that way – that we never know until afterwards that our lives are about to change, sometimes in a moment.

It was actually my father’s throwaway remark about joining the Girl Guides that was to result in an early milestone in my life – my first trip overseas, or ‘abroad’, as it was known in England.

Our weekly Girl Guide meetings were held at an old English manor house and one lovely July evening when I was thirteen I was introduced to a French Girl Guide who was spending a month with one of my friends and her family. Agnes Blanchard and I exchanged names and addresses and promised to write (of course we never did) and I promptly forgot about her.

And then the following March our phone rang at home and my mother was amazed to find it was a call from Paris. A chance meeting was to become a milestone and introduce me to a life of travelling.

Paris! It was like the little girl in the movie meeting ET.

When the excitement had died down Doris announced that I had been invited to stay for two months with the Blanchard family in France. Letters were exchanged between the two families and Doris somehow found the money necessary for my first foray into foreign fields. I was to cross the Channel alone on the ferry from Dover to Boulogne and take the train to the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris, where Monsieur Blanchard would meet me wearing a red tie as a means of recognition.

Ah, the innocence of those times! Fourteen years old, I was to travel out of England for the first time, to an unknown country, be met by someone I didn’t know and to put myself in the bosom of a family I knew nothing about. But Doris cheerfully accepted on my behalf (oh, how much I owe to Doris!) and I have never looked back.

After a dreadful Channel crossing, where I sat on a lifeboat container on deck in a lime-green coat that had been bought with the last of the family’s clothes coupons and nearly died of seasickness, followed by a train ride to Paris, I climbed down the high train stairs on the platform of Gare Saint-Lazare and waited hopefully for a fatherly kind of Maurice Chevalier character to rush up and kiss me on both cheeks.

And waited and waited.

Perhaps M. Blanchard didn’t recognise me from my schoolgirl photograph? The previous year I had been a scruffy Girl Guide with two long plaits. I was now tall and slim with a chignon.

I spotted a man with a red tie and boldly introduced myself.

Wrong.

Then did the same to another, and another.

By then a gendarme was eyeing me suspiciously.

I was saved from imminent arrest for loitering and soliciting by a short fat man who rushed up to me and kissed me on both cheeks.

‘Mlle Kate?’

‘Oui, monsieur,’ I said, casting a virtuous and triumphant look at the gendarme.

M. Blanchard had been held up because there was a transport strike on in Paris and his silver Citroën had been surrounded by frustrated Parisians demanding lifts. The same thing happened on our way to the station where I was to catch the night train to Cannes and meet Agnes and the family. People shook their fists at me through the car windows and shouted what seemed like terrible insults. M. Blanchard drove calmly and silently on but at a speed that suggested we were being pursued by a thousand demons. This was my first experience of Continental driving and it was terrifying.

Finally, I was put on the appropriate overnight train, given a little white pillow and a bottle of lemonade, re-kissed on both cheeks and left alone with the other occupants of the carriage.

I was too excited to sleep so I went out into the rattling and swaying corridor to watch the lights of the unfamiliar landscape flash by.

I hadn’t been out there long before a swarthy-complexioned gentleman of medium height, uncertain age and a thin moustache approached me. He spoke to me in French but I politely explained that I was a stranger to the country and spoke English and only a bit of schoolgirl French.

‘I am from Portugal,’ he announced, placing a protective and restraining arm round my waist.

I was naïve, untravelled, inexperienced and fresh from a convent but I was female and immediately recognised danger signals.

I had met my first wolf.

(I’m not sure what that kind of man is called today, but it was a wolf when I was fourteen.)

I hastily withdrew to the safety of my crowded compartment and as a parting shot repeated as nastily and haughtily as possible a remark that I had overheard my experienced cousin Joyce, who had been a WAAF during the war, use confidingly to a friend: ‘Latins are lousy lovers.’

(Whether that piece of information is true or not, I’ve never found out because I’ve not had a Latin lover … yet.)

I awoke in the early morning to sun shining on pink and white houses and the sparkling blue Mediterranean. Palm trees waved along the beaches. The train sped through ravines of red rock and hills that were covered with yellow mimosa.

You must remember that this was 1948. I had just left a cold, grey post-war England. Here everything was glowing with light and colour. It was if I had been transported into a technicolour Hollywood movie.

I hadn’t given a lot of thought as to where I was going to be staying. Things had moved so swiftly since that phone call that I was just living day to day, hour to hour. But if I had thought about it, I suppose I would have imagined one of those pink and white cottages I saw from the train. What I did not expect was a grand white-pillared villa facing the beach standing in about an acre of flowers and fruit trees. Inside this dwelling – the most beautiful I had ever seen in real life – a couple of maids were bustling about, being harried by a plump dowager who turned to greet me. Every feature, every gesture read matriarch. This was Madame Blanchard and she ran the villa as efficiently as she ran her husband, Agnes, Agnes’s little sister and their brother Georges, who was studying at the Sorbonne. Luckily Madame spent the greater part of the morning in bed, appearing only at mealtimes; in the evening she played Solitaire in her dressing room. M. Blanchard was still in Paris.

We spent a month at Cap d’Antibes. The time passed for me as if in some wonderful dream of laughter, superb food, singing, dancing, swimming and sitting under the stars.

The Blanchard siblings had crowds of young friends and cousins, and friends of Georges from the Sorbonne, who joined the party at the villa soon after I arrived.

Schooled in a convent and having only girl friends, I was flung into the midst of any number of young men whose gaiety and lack of inhibitions were infectious. I quickly learned to parry my way through a number of innocent flirtations and soon felt like a really experienced woman of the world.

We went everywhere. We would divide up into two parties, and pile into ancient Citroëns. I drove along the Promenade des Anglais at Nice, saw Errol Flynn (think the Brad Pitt of the 40s) on his yacht at Cannes, leaned over the parapet outside the prince’s palace in Monaco and looked down on the unforgettable view of Monte Carlo. I gazed reverently at the casino (where I would have a flutter 30 years later), inspected the perfumeries and fields of carnations and roses at Grasse, where I daringly spent my tiny amount of pocket money on a bottle of Chanel No. 5, and visited the village where Picasso lived and created some of his famous plates.

The Duke and Duchess of Windsor owned the villa next door to the Blanchards and we would sometimes see them walking in their garden holding hands. The Duke of Windsor had been King of England before he abdicated to marry Wallis Simpson – and now here he was next door!

One day we all went up a mountain where the boys raced their cars down the narrow road and screeched their tyres around hairpin bends as each tried to overtake the other.

I still cherish those early memories – of coming down to breakfast on Easter Sunday to find the table profusely decorated with snowy camellias; of my first glimpse of undersea life when, armed with goggles and flippers, I swam among delicate fronds of seaweed and watched tiny bright fish moving silently and small crabs scuttling about on the rocky bottom; of the flower market at Nice; and gathering the fluffy balls of mimosa on the steep hills overlooking the sea.

Back in Paris, at the Blanchards’ huge five-bedroomed apartment a few steps away from the Boulevard Saint-Michel, Agnes went back to school, Georges resumed lectures at the Sorbonne, and I was left alone to walk the Left Bank and discover the City of Lights by myself.

Some mornings I went shopping in the little markets with Madame Blanchard to buy fruit, vegetables and meat and watched her haggle over prices with the stall keepers. Other mornings we would cross one of Paris’s famous bridges and walk to the Champs-Élysées, where we would meet Simone, Agnes’s cousin, who was shortly to be married. We would shop for silk and lace for her trousseau and then drink coffee and nibble pastries in a pâtisserie where chic women accompanied by equally chic dogs sipped their coffee.

Then we would stroll to the streets where the couturiers like Christian Dior and Coco Chanel had their boutiques. At first I was disappointed at the tiny windows that displayed one hat, or one Louis XIV chair with a blouse thrown negligently over it, realising only later that this was the consummate taste and elegance of the French.

But most days I would go out alone and wander the streets. I spent many mornings in the Louvre, sketching works of Old Masters. I fed the bold sparrows outside of Notre-Dame Cathedral with crumbs saved from my breakfast croissant, or I would amble along the Seine sorting among the old books and junk of the little barrows lining the banks.

I went to parties at the Sorbonne with Georges, learned to jive in the rather mechanical French manner and endured an unintelligible evening at the Comédie Française that was playing the French version of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. (The Blanchards had mistakenly believed it was one of my matric set-works.) I didn’t dare display my ignorance and laughed and scowled when everybody else did.

I returned to 69 Firwood Avenue supremely confident, speaking reasonably good French, with a jaunty tilt to my beret and convinced I had fully drunk of the cup of human experience.

And are you surprised that from that time on my love of travelling and the unknown has never left me?

My last days at school were transformed by the Hon Gwen, the new English teacher, just down from Oxford and a friend of (gasp!) Ken Tynan, the foremost, witty theatre critic of the day and a celebrity before celebrities were even invented.

The Hon Gwen regaled us with anecdotes and daring tales of university life and once took me and my best friend Vicki to a party in Oxford, where we tried to look ultra-sophisticated and come across with some witty repartee. She also taught me how to do the Daily Telegraph cryptic crossword, which I still do to this day.

But the Hon Gwen’s attentions to the glories of English literature were not all that her devout employers might have wished for.

One hot day in June we sat in the Lower XI classroom listening to the Derby, England’s most famous horse race, on Vicki’s portable radio. A group of workmen repairing the veranda had gathered at the French doors to listen in. Just as the race reached the final furlong, I noticed the door handle turning.

I slammed the desk lid down.

‘I think Shelley has less to offer than Gerald Manley Hopkins,’ I said wildly as the Mother Superior entered with a party of visiting priests.

Muffled cheers could be heard from beneath the desk lid as we all stood dutifully and said good afternoon. The workmen suddenly became frantically busy and examined the French doors for cracks, gazing at them as fixedly as if they expected to find the secret of eternal life there. Mother Superior had come to show the visitors the beautiful Adam fireplace in the room our Sixth Form inhabited, which was in an old manor house away from the main school buildings.

Suddenly loud cheers broke the uneasy silence.

Mother Superior rose to the occasion. ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘it’s the Fifth Form hockey period.’ Some of us nodded fervent confirmation. ‘Hockey is a very excitable game,’ she added apologetically as she swept out of the room followed by a cluster of clerical collars and long black robes.

As the last priest left he winked at me.

I’ve had a soft spot for priests ever since.

Convent schooldays were sometimes enlivened by movies (‘films’ in those days) and the nuns introduced us to the classics with films like Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice. Always having our spiritual welfare firmly at heart, at the least sign of physical contact between hero and heroine, the plump white hand of Mother Xavier, who worked the not very reliable projector, would be placed over the lens. This resulted in an inky blackness on the screen punctuated by a soundtrack of heavy breathing. We never knew if this was from Mother Xavier or our hero and heroine. Sometimes she would take her hand away too soon and get pink and flustered. Vicki and I observed these ruses to protect our innocence with scorn. We were fourteen years old and spent all our pocket money on going to the theatre and watching films. We were experienced and knowledgeable about the ways of the world.

But not really. Not in any form of practice.