This goes in around 1935, 1936 that I used to go and stay with my grandmother, my maternal grandmother, Duchess of Rutland, who was a superb pencil portraitist. She spent her whole day drawing people, drawing anybody she saw. She never moved without a whole bunch of orange HB pencils and a sketchbook and a crust of bread with which she always rubbed out. She didn't believe in rubbers, she only liked the crust of bread. And she must have drawn a couple of hundred of me. She'd do it all the time because she loved me and whenever she saw me, she was out there doing it, you know. Nowadays from time to time people write me and say, 'I may have a drawing of you by your grandmother, would you like it?' I say, 'No, thank you so much, I already have 357, I really don't need any more.' They never stopped.

But she tried... she had this very unfortunate idea that drawing was terribly easy once you knew how and that she could easily teach me to do it for myself. And I happened not to be able to draw a line on a piece of paper. I mean, I'm so ungifted; I can't draw anything at all. But I spent hours in bed with her learning... doing... she only did features. We did eyes and ears and noses and mouths and chins, and I got no better at all. It was tedious, it was appalling because I knew I was never going to get it but she always thought success was just round the corner.