I wanted to go to boarding school because I’d read, you know, girls boarding school books. And they sent me... were going to send me, anyway, to a very good school called Downe House in... which was in Berkshire. And I went there for a term and a bit but it was by that time the war was on. My father’s school was in Cumberland, and they sent home all the girls whose parents were in the North in case they got separated by the invasion.

And my parents couldn’t think of any school anywhere near that was academically any good, and unlike too many parents in those days, it never occurred to them to give me a less good education than my brother. So they sent me to Roedean which was evacuated to Keswick. And there I was deeply miserable for two years, and finally got a... but they evacuated into a hotel. So there was a huge relief map of the neighbourhood on which I could plot the 30 miles or so across which I did in the end mount my bicycle and ride home.

And I realised I could never have lived down Roedean on Fleet Street, if I hadn’t run away from it, but people tend to keep starting with it, as you did, so that I wish in a way it was expunged from the entire record. Because after that, I went to school in Glasgow, to a day school, and really I’ve been perfectly happy ever since.