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her
parts in three full-length ballets. This was after Nijinsky’s tragic departure, when Massine was principal male dancer. My mother taught him to read music.
    She spent just over a year with the Ballets Russes, after Paris, when they were in Monte Carlo and then Rome. Then she encountered my father and wanted to marry him. This was only possible, my
paternal grandfather said, if she gave up dancing. My mother’s family was pretty hard up. She wasn’t conventionally good-looking, and in 1920 the wholesale slaughter of thousands of men
meant that many women had either lost their husbands or fiancés, or had little hope of finding either.
    My mother was clearly bowled over by my father’s glamour and easy charm. I think he was probably the first man she fell in love with, although what precisely that meant for her is hard to
say. She certainly wanted to marry him – according to my uncle John – and that happened. She gave up dancing and took to middle-class married life with more money than she’d ever
had before, servants, a house to keep, but nothing else to do.
    My mother wasn’t gregarious. She loved her family, but had few close friends outside it. From her demeanour and attitude to it, it was clear that she never enjoyed sex. What did she and my
father have in common? They both had a sense of humour – could laugh at the same things and make jokes together. They enjoyed sailing and skiing together. I really can’t think of
anything else. A year after marriage she had a daughter – who was either stillborn or died soon after birth. In my grandmother’s prayer book against the date of her birth or death there
is a cross, marked in ink, and ‘I have no name.’ This wasn’t so: she was called Jane – the name my motherhad used for dancing: she had been called Jane
Forrestier, it being de rigueur for women dancers to have French-sounding names.
    I was born a year later on 26 March 1923 and I was also named Jane although this time there was the prefix Elizabeth. Two and a half years later, she had my brother Robin, and Colin, the
youngest, was born nine years later.
    Outwardly my parents’ lives were full of social incident. They had a fairly large circle of friends with whom they went to the theatre, to concerts, to the ‘flicks’, as the
cinema was called, to dinner with each other in their various houses, and to restaurants often to dine and dance. Sometimes they went away for shooting weekends and every year they skied for two
weeks in Switzerland, and went sailing in Cornwall. Robin didn’t mind them going away, but I was miserable for weeks before they left: used to cry in bed about it. I’d not have minded
my father going away, which he sometimes did anyway, on business, but I couldn’t bear the idea that my mother wasn’t in the house, was nowhere, out of sight, unreachable. In those days
the telephone wasn’t used as a means of keeping in touch, so there was silence for the two weeks, which always seemed interminable to me.
    Christmas Day of my sixth or seventh year had been a haze of excitement. There was feasting and everybody was smiling. There were wonderful presents that were deliciously divided between things
I’d always wanted and things I’d never even heard of, the best being a little toy pony with real pony fur, and a cart for him to draw, and a stable for him to sleep in. Suddenly, after
tea, a stroke of doom – a ripple of departure in the room, an acceleration of bonhomie and then the blinding moment when I realized that both my parents were going away, that minute, to a
place called Switzerland for a holiday. They’d kissed me and had gone. I was left sitting on the nursery floor surrounded by a sea of presents and undulating waves of tissue paper. In vain
did various aunts and uncles point out their generosity to me. The gorgeous presents became valueless as the front door distantly slammed. They couldn’tcompensate for the
interminable time and unknown