Until my sister left home for Teachers’ Training College – presumably when she was eighteen and I fourteen – we shared a bedroom. My brothers, being older, had a room each.

I went back a few years ago and the room had been cut in half, but in those days it had two windows, facing East over our garden, low enough for the sun to wake me as it danced through the trees and played on my face. Something I love still: I always sleep facing East for preference, with the windows as wide open as possible, summer and winter, as my father did.

(My daughter Serena has asked me many times why we don’t simply sleep outside. I’m not quite sure what the answer is… except perhaps that it’s more conventional in the West to make love in private. And reading by the light of the moon could be restrictive.)

We had a gas fire in our bedroom, and on cold winter mornings would hug as close to it as we could to get dressed. My mother was reduced to drawing a line down the middle of the hearth so my sister and I could each stay in our own space. I tell you this to put what follows in context… My best friend Henrietta once told me that she and her two brothers (one now a composer of incomprehensible music, the other a well-known comic actor, while I believe Henrietta herself looks after Her Majesty’s art collection) never argued. Yes, you heard correctly. Never a cross word between the three of them. If that is as incomprehensible to you as it was to me, your childhood has something in common with mine.

One afternoon my sister and I must have been making such a row that my father couldn’t work, for he came in and asked what it was all about.

I, being only five or so, sat tongue-tied. My more articulate sister explained… perhaps what my offence was, but I honestly can’t remember.

And my next memory must be inaccurate. My father can’t actually have said this, but what for decades I remembered his saying was, “Well, Anne’s the youngest so she must be right,” and the dispute was thus decided in my favour.

And for several dozen years, I considered this extremely unfair. Even at the time, I did.

Only now am I revisiting this memory and wondering whether it should be reinterpreted. What had my father, a just and decent man, observed?

I hated my school years, from eleven to sixteen. If I say I was always in trouble, you will think I am exaggerating. Our terrifying hockey teacher, Miss Thorburn, who clearly disliked me even more than I disliked school, complained that the establishment needed two Lost Property cupboards: one for the other five hundred girls, and another just for me. I still can’t understand why this was such a sin. I lost stuff. So? I soon learnt never to wear a coat, gloves or a scarf to school: it was so much easier to go cold than be shouted at yet again. 

The worst disgrace the school could inflict was to be seated outside the Headmistress’s office, in public view. Eventually you would be called in and she would ask what you’d done and you would tell her. That was it. So presumably the intended force of the punishment – especially as this won you a reprieve from the lesson that had got you into trouble in the first place – was the humiliation.

Most pupils probably never experienced this in all their seven years. I sat there about once a week. (And to this day am virtually immune to embarrassment. Perhaps I always was.)

At the end of every term my dear kind father would invite me into his study, read me my report, give me sixpence and say, “Never mind dear. Everyone has to have one bad school report in life.” Had he genuinely forgotten all the others?

Being the child of teachers myself, I assumed it was my fault. Of course I did. All my life.

Until… well, until about ten years ago.

I was at a Gaudy Dinner in Brasenose College, where two others from my class are also members. (Not much choice of college for women, when we were educated.)

They were discussing what they enjoyed about school, I eventually chipped in and said I pretty much loathed it all, and they both said, spontaneously and in unison, “Well of course you did. All the teachers bullied you.”

(Oh, but no! Miss Dix, our English teacher, was always kind to me: I don’t think she told me off once. Which is presumably why I read English.)

You might have propped my jaw up with a broom handle.

Over the next few stunned minutes, days, years, I reconsidered the narrative I’d always believed. I was incorrigible. I exasperated my poor teachers morning, noon and night. But if my classmates could see, from their desks the other side of the room, what was going on… If it was that obvious to others…

And it suddenly made total sense. Not necessarily why I was picked on; but that I was, for sure.

The accusation most often levelled at me during my school years was that I was “lazy.” I didn’t really understand this, but it was repeated so often it must be true.

And yet when I was eleven or twelve, on my parents’ long teachers’ family summer holiday, I took The Complete Works of Shakespeare, a book I had bought for myself, in tiny print on India paper, and I started at the beginning and I simply read and read. Hours every day.

Lazy?

Or out of step?

And bullied.

And when I’m asked if I had a happy childhood, I usually say, “Ye-es… I… did… But as a teenager” I then immediately add enthusiastically, “I was deliriously happy.”

This has always puzzled me slightly. My parents were wonderful, kind, nurturing people. They gave me everything I needed. And much of what I wanted. (Except a pony: I don’t know why. And a parrot: fair enough. And the school I asked for… though they did eventually let me go to a different one, after O Levels, when I point blank refused to attend that one any more.)

Why don’t I reply, with huge enthusiasm and certainty, “Yes! I had a very happy childhood!”

At the back of my mind are shadowy figures, bigger than I and more powerful. I compared notes with Shaun, the oldest of four as I was the youngest. It’s normal, he said.

Just children. Being children.

By my mid-teens, however, I was the only one left at home…

And happier than the long midsummer days stretching into the pale and partying moonlit nights.

(Perhaps it was because you moved schools, Shaun said.)