Iwas just eight years old when my father bought ‘Einhallow’ - a wilderness of charm and melancholy. The house itself was built of white stone and concrete. One part was covered in silvery, small-leaf ivy and, at the front, a creeper grew which turned a lovely colour in the latter part of the year.

You entered through a cloister in the shape of a small chapel and pulled an iron thong which made the bell ring out like a church bell. The rooms were beautiful and large and there was a lift from the kitchen to the drawing room and a speaking tube to every room in the house which stood on sand and gravel which pleased my mother so much as she said it was healthy to live on gravel soil.

All the doors were of pitch pine. They did not have round handles but long ones like a corkscrew and the finger plates were of beaten brass - with the exception of the one in the drawing room which was hand painted with cuspids and flowers - said to have been done after Botticelli

I can see every detail in that house - the beautiful staircase and my father’s study - he was a writer.

I can see my bed with a shade over it, the nursery and the dolls house and the wooden animals whom I loved. I used to take them into the garden to eat milk wort as they lay with me on the green grass under the mulberry tree.

It was an enchanted garden. My sister and I went round and  

round it with pencils writing down the different names of the trees, the flowers and the fruit. This is how it ran: there were apple trees; a love bond pear tree - the most exquisite of pears; a mulberry tree; the white heart cherry tree - from which my father used to gather the cherries when ready and distil cherry brandy which my sister, Rosie, loved. She would steal into the wine cellar and gloat over the ones that were sometimes left in a big bowl to soak.

Along the kitchen garden, thick bushes were covered in redcurrants and blackcurrants. Gooseberries were great fat yellow things which burst when we picked them and how I did love the redcurrant pies my mother used to make for me to take to school.

My school was a convent near the old parish church at Croydon, where bells used to ring. I had to walk three miles along Upper Addiscombe Road into the town and down Crown Hill to Queen Elizabeth Old Palace School.

I was fond of gathering roses from the garden at ‘Einhallow’ and presenting them to a beautiful nun who taught in my class - called Sister Agnes. She was tall and gaunt and I loved her kind eyes which looked through glasses. A large cross, which swung when she walked, hung from her waist on a chord. There was another small cross on her chest which shone like a diamond and peeped through the white frills she wore. She loved roses and I told her ‘Einhallow had roses, roses all the way.’