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think he dealt with it simply by not growing up. He was a boy when he went out, and he came back crammed with awful knowledge that was never revealed or digested.
    He remained a boy – a dashing, glamorous boy – determined to make the best of the holidays, determined that they should go on for ever. He had a job to go to in the family timber
firm of which his father was chairman. He knew nothing whatever about business, but he loved meeting people; he loved buying and selling wood; he loved shooting, skiing, sailing and playing games
– golf, tennis, squash, billiards, chess, bridge. Contract bridge was all the rage after the war. He loved dancing and parties of any kind, and he loved women, who fell for him like rows of
shingled ninepins. I hardly ever heard any women talk about him without mentioning how good-looking he was and how charming. His charm was real, because it was largely unconscious. He was over six
feet tall, had bright blue eyes, a small military moustache, and wavy brown hair that he plastered flat with hair oil. He dressed very well: his suits – many and varied – were always
beautifully cut; with an enormous silk handkerchief in the breast pocket. I always enjoyed watching the grace with which he took off his hat to any lady he met in the street.
    He loved music, played the violin, though seldom in my childhood, and music made him cry or at least brought tears to his eyes;Tchaikovsky was a great favourite. Men liked
him; women were sometimes dangerously keen on him. He was definitely not intellectual, practically never read a book; like Uncle Matthew in The Pursuit of Love , he had read one or two and
they were so frightfully good that he didn’t need to look further.
    He was one of the most gregarious people I have ever known, totally uncritical of any company he kept, and he behaved, at the slightest encouragement, as though it was his birthday. These
mythical, frequently recurring birthdays were at first a mystery to me – they seemed to happen about once a month without him getting much older. ‘It’s my birthday,’ he
would tell the wine waiter when he ordered champagne, or the shop assistant when he bought five pounds of chocolates to take home.
    He was physically very brave and morally a coward, although naturally I’d no idea of this until much later. His younger brother, my uncle John, told me towards the end of his life that
after the war my father had nearly become engaged to a girl called Cicely. Both families were against the marriage, so it didn’t take place. My father married my mother on the rebound, on 12
May 1921.
    My mother was the second of four children by my Somervell grandparents. Her older sister, Antonia, was always considered a beauty and married in her early twenties. They had twin brothers.
Antonia was admired for her beauty and her gentle disposition; the twins were admired for being twins and boys, and my mother came a poor last with her mother, at least. She was very small,
with a tremendous head of hair – as a young girl she could sit on it – heavy eyebrows, brown eyes, an aquiline nose, and high cheekbones. She was, one of my twin uncles told me, the
intellectual of the family: she read a great deal, and when she was sixteen decided that she wanted to be a ballet dancer. Her father must have supported her in this, as my grandmother
wouldn’t have considered any career necessary or desirable for a woman.
    Somehow, my mother got into Enrico Cecchetti’s class, the teacher whom all ballet dancers revered. Visiting ballerinas fromthe Ballets Russes would come for classes
with him. I have a picture – a drawing of all the people in the class with her: they include Ninette de Valois, Mimi Rambert, Lydia Kyasht and Lopokova. From this class she was picked up by
Diaghilev to join his company in the corps de ballet . Her first rehearsals were in Paris, conducted chiefly in Russian of which she knew hardly a word, and she had three days to learn