My first memory of my mother – probably, indeed, my first genuine memory at all (I have others going further back, but I suspect they were formed later, from my aunt’s black-and-white jerky cine footage of my very young childhood) – is not very edifying. 

We had bannisters going round and up and up and round, as is the way of bannisters, hugging a stairwell reaching up three floors.

And at the bottom, in the hallway of the head master’s quarters within the main body of the school which formed my adored childhood-and-teenage-home and some of my fondest years, there was the most tempting chessboard of maroon and black tiles, each about five inches square, you ever saw in your life. (Last time I looked a few years ago, I believe it was still there.)

It was made for target practice. 

Nothing else can have been in the mind of the designer, except for a four-year-old to try and hit them, smack bang in the middle of some designated tile.

So I leant over the top rung, and aimed… 

Splat.

Hmm. Not quite on the right square.

I tried again.

Even less successful.

Young as I was, I was also ambitious. And persistent. And knew that, if I wanted to perfect a skill, I must try and try and try again. 

Soon I was entering mid-season form, as Wodehouse would say, and showing no sign of running out of spittle.

My mother was standing in the hall itself, talking to another adult: possibly a parent or prospective parent of a boy at the school, as she often was. 

Alas: adults and children often have conflicting agendas. I cared nothing for the impression created in the eye of the visitor. My mother cared nothing for improving my aim.

Some parents would have run upstairs, grabbed me by the arm, told me I was disgusting and asked what I was about. At that time, plenty would probably have boxed my ears or smacked my bottom or sent me to bed with no tea.

How did my mother vent her ire, and impress deep into my young soul that this behaviour was never, ever to be repeated again if I was to live another day under my parents’ protection?

“That’s not very nice,” was her quiet, gentle and devastating verdict. “I don’t think we want that.”

Humiliated beyond measure, I never spat on the tiles again…

At my mother’s funeral my very dear friend, schoolmate and close neighbour throughout our formative years until university, Anne Willcocks (whose father David was colleague to my father at that time, and co-undergraduate before that when he was Organ Scholar to my father’s Choral Scholarship) said,

“Your mother was terrifying.”

“Terrifying?” I said, amazed. “My mother? My mother?!” (I had long been in awe of Anne’s mother – she was so scarily efficient – and thirteen years old before I realised how kind and considerate she was too… when I broke a jug in her kitchen.)

“You can’t mean my mother, surely? She was the kindest person in the world.”

“Precisely,” Anne said. “We’d be in your family drawing room, you, me and Helen, with a bunch of undergraduates, acting out charades or playing music at three am, O Levels the next day probably, and your mother would come in… and instead of shouting at us and asking furiously what on Earth we thought we were doing and packing us off home with our tails between our legs, she would simply ask, very sweetly, ‘Do you think your mother wants you to be here?’”

“It was the most crushing thing ever. It would have been so much easier if she’d just told us off.”