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of an illustrated children’s book. “Like living in la-la land,” said Jane, “not like the real world at all.”
    *   *   *
    From the beginning, Lucie was a grown-up, conscientious girl with a childish earnestness that made adults smile. When Jane gave her peas to shell, she would examine each one individually, rejecting any that displayed the smallest sign of imperfection. She loved dolls and would sit alongside her mother breast-feeding a plastic baby as Jane breast-fed Sophie. “She was so meticulous and tidy and neat,” said Jane. “Like me from an early age.” Sophie, by contrast, was “stroppy” and prone to tantrums, which her older sister gently and skillfully defused. The two sisters shared a big old-fashioned bed, and one Easter Sunday they spent the entire day living underneath it, taking their meals there, reading their picture books, and tending to their toys.
    Lucie’s school exercise books suggest how successfully Jane created for her children a world of innocence and delight.
    Name: Lucy Blackman
    Subject: News
    Monday 20th May
    To-day Daddy is going
    to collect me from
    school and we are
    going to go home and
    I am going to get
    my Laura Ashley dress
    and it is bluey
    gray and it has
    little flowers and then
    I am going to in to Tescos
    home and wear and
    I am going to get Gemma
    a preasnt but I don’t
    know what to get her
    for her birthday treat
    and she is having
    four friends that is
    me and Celia and
    Charlotte and another
    frend in her school
    and I will be the
    only one from Granville
    friends friends friends friends
    And from another exercise book:
    Name: Lucy Blackman
    Subject: Experiments
    Light
    I used a large mirror.
    I looked at myself.
    I saw my reflection.
    I closed one eye.
    I saw myself with one eye closed.
    I touched my nose.
    I saw myself with my right hand on my nose.
    I clapped my hands.
    I saw my hands clap.

    I used a large mirror.
    I put the mirror at the side.
    I saw the world the right way round.
    “Because my childhood was sad I always wanted to have a wonderful, happy family life,” said Jane. “I’d put their slippers down the front of the stove so they’d be warm when they came home from school. When Rupert used to play rugby, I’d take a hot-water bottle and a flask of hot tea when I met him from school. My biggest fear was losing them. Even when they were little. I had these leather reins with a little picture of a bunny rabbit on them, these reins that I used to make Rupert wear. I’d have him on reins, and to the girls I’d say, ‘You hold hands,’ and in the supermarket if I lost sight of one of them I would feel … It was the worst thing for me, loss, because of what had happened to me. That was always my biggest fear—losing. Because I’d lost my mother, I just couldn’t bear the thought of ever losing the children. So I was a very protective—an overprotective—mother.”
    *   *   *
    Lucie won a scholarship to Walthamstow Hall, a stalwart redbrick nineteenth-century institution founded for the daughters of Christian missionaries. She was a hard worker and might have been expected to flourish at “Wally Hall,” which took pride in the number of girls it sent to university. And yet Lucie never quite fitted in there. “Walthamstow Hall was quite a posh school,” said Jane. “A lot of girls on their birthday were given car keys. That was their birthday present, and that wasn’t the league we were in at all.” However, the darkest shadow over Lucie’s teenage years was not money but illness.
    At the age of twelve, she contracted mycoplasma pneumonia, a rare form of the illness, which laid her low for weeks. “She was very, very ill and no one knew what was the matter with her,” said Jane. “She’d be propped up in bed on so many pillows, and I had to give her this treatment to get rid of the mucus, to pummel her back. There was a rattle when she breathed, you could hear it in her lungs.” Afterwards Lucie was afflicted