Chapter 2

My earliest memories are of family life in Ornan Road, Belsize Park, in the late 1960s. These memories are fragmentary - of climbing up onto a high stool to reach the fashionable 'island' in the middle of the kitchen; of crouching in the gallery looking down on an adult dinner party, with all its disquieting mystery and sophistication.

I am lying on the bottom bunk with my feet above my head, pushing with the soles of my feet at the lump of my brother on the top bunk through a metal network of springs, strung between blue metal poles. His annoyingly familiar curly-haired head appears, hanging over the edge. On Sundays, I climb into my parents' bed as they read the Observer; I dip an unusually shaped spoon full of caster sugar into their little cups of coffee, and watch the liquid creep up the sugar until all the white granules have turned brown. Then I put the mixture in my mouth and suck it like a sweet. I now know that the unusually shaped spoon is a modernist masterpiece designed by Arne Jacobsen, but then it was just a strange spoon. When I am not fighting my brother I am taking my bike up to the garage to practise my moves, or climbing up to the garage roof to eat forbidden sweets.

I am in the garden in summer, playing in a long, cotton, blue and white stripy tunnel that keeps its shape with metal hoops. Tony's face, looking relaxed with jet-black hair and Michael Caine glasses, is framed in the circle, as if at the wrong end of a telescope; I crawl inside - the tunnel traps the warm air and feels hot.

Expeditions from Ornan Road included trips to piano lessons, which I dreaded, and much more appealing expeditions to the bakery. Here were delicious smells, tempting macaroons, Viennese fingers, all sorts of different loaves and rolls, little cakes and almost always we would buy iced buns. They were meltingly soft, with a generous layer of icing on top. One day, although I had no idea of it, there was a man standing behind us in the queue. He was an impressive, highly intelligent looking youngish man, well built, like a rugby player, with thick bushy eyebrows. He kept shooting furtive looks at us and at one point made as though to come over, an expression of greeting stealing over his face. But he changed his mind and looked at the floor. Laura hurried out of the shop with me at her side, with our paper bag full of buns, and didn't look at him.

In the garden at Ornan Road

I remember an unusual tea party somewhere in West End Lane with Auntie Marion - a formidable presence - and lots of 'Other Children' whom I did not know. Who was Auntie Marion? She was aged and imbued with a sort of mystical wisdom, and was not my actual aunt.

Somewhere, in the streets of Belsize Park, Swiss Cottage and Hampstead, we did not know it, but a woman was searching for my mother. Sure that she had found her, she would follow someone, only for them to turn round and present a stranger's face.

One day Tony put on a dark suit and went off to what we understood was his own father's funeral. I had never met this grandfather in the flesh, and only had the vaguest sense of a mean-looking man in a wheelchair, and that he made Tony unhappy. Then some time later my mother disappeared for a few days and our father was left in charge. I thought that he wouldn't know how to do the warm milk properly. I needn't have worried. He did it fine. Mum returned with my little brother, Merlin, and the family was now complete.

In 1970 Laura and Tony moved with their family of three children the short distance from Ornan Road to 38A Downshire Hill, its name, 'Moel Lys', written in wrought iron above the front door. This house was to be the centre of our existence for the next twenty-three years.

I can't remember the exact day of moving in, or indeed anything much about the move. I just remember having my own bedroom. No more brothers, no more bunk beds. Apparently I wrote a letter in rounded seven-year-old hand to Tony saying, 'Dear Daddy, Thank you for earning enough money so that we can live in our lovely new house.' Tony always thought this revealed a kind of underlying suspicion that this money might not always be so forthcoming, which turned out to be rather prescient. My room was a fairytale, situated upstairs at the back of the house and nestled in amongst trees and gardens. It had three large windows and was flooded with light.

My big brother and I raced around our new domain, pushing open the light wrought-iron gate, running down the red brick path to lift the brass knocker on our new front door. At the front of the house was a small garden, threaded with little stone paths, planted with hydrangeas and shaded by a spreading lime tree. Inside you came straight to a hallway, dark and still, with Arts and Crafts style wooden panelling up to about three feet high. The other side of the hallway brought you out onto a small wooden 'gallery' from which you could survey the loveliest room in the house - a large, light, square sitting room, which our parents immediately transformed by laying a bright yellow carpet. They then added a black leather Liberty sofa, a whole wall of Habitat modular bookshelving, an enormous hi-fi cabinet, and a large, bold, modernist Léger print of the face of a lady with a schematic tree. It hangs in my own sitting room now, and many people think it looks like me. Perhaps when my parents bought it in the 1960s they were unconsciously attracted to a picture that looked a bit like themselves. I can see myself sleepily stretched out in front of the gas fire while a Beethoven piano sonata plays.

We had one or two visitors and I can call to mind the frantically squealing two dogs rolling up and down the orange-carpeted stairs, lost in the crazy joy of the moment - our new golden retriever puppy and a friend's grown-up terrier, of the same size as our puppy, called Jinkie. My mother's laugh rings out.

Sketch of Ant by Laura

While my brother, Ant, and I were involved in taking possession of our magical new kingdom, Laura rolled up her sleeves and set about applying coat after coat of emulsion to the kitchen until the last trace of Germolene pink finally disappeared. Then she got to work in the garden, planting cerea, little yellow puffs of flower, orange blossom with its dark green glossy leaves and creamy flowers, geraniums, wild strawberries and many other flowers. Her colour palette was white, cream, mauve, green, pink and yellow. When Tony tried to plant a bright red camellia she vetoed it immediately.

Ant and I loved the garden too. You had to give the metal frame of the French windows in the sitting room a good kick to open them. You came out onto a stone terrace adorned with a pergola, next to which Laura planted a jasmine, encouraging it to grow up the wooden struts and spread itself over the terrace. Rough stone steps descended to the lawn, planted on either side with geraniums and wild strawberries.

We drove our wooden trolley round and round on the grass until it scored a deep muddy track. A huge oak tree dominated the lawn, and one of its long, horizontal branches ran along the intersection of a shed roof with a high garden wall, providing a perfect place to hang out. We played up there for hours, surveying the adult life below, and it didn't take us long before we discovered the neighbours: two boys with staggeringly posh little voices called Nicholas and Henry who pronounced 'I ain't' as if they were the queen. Henry would walk up and down on the low wall dividing our two gardens saying 'Now. now, now, now. now. (pause) now, now. (pause) now. now. now (pause) now.now. now. now (pause), as if about to reveal the most brilliant game in the world, but nothing ever came of it.

On the other side, a trellis separated us from the other set of neighbours, who were all grown ups. We could hear Gill Greenwood, the wife of Tony Greenwood, Harold Wilson's Minister of Housing, moving about and talking. We fell rather silent then and a slight tension entered the air as Gill had lots of cats and our golden retriever, who was slightly out of control, had found a place to get through the fence. The very far end of the garden was shady and dark, planted with trees and shrubs; a low wall divided it from the back garden of a house in Keats Grove lived in by a lady called Jess Weeks, who seemed ancient.

The final place to explore was upstairs. The orange-carpeted staircase took you up to a half landing, where the first thing on your left was a door leading to the upstairs bathroom. It was a pretty room with a window onto the side passage, with an old-fashioned, free-standing, lion-footed bath, a lino floor, a black-and-white cloth bathmat with three elephants of increasing size, each holding the other's tail with its trunk, and a wooden slatted door to the airing cupboard, which was just the right size for my seven-year-old self to curl up and hide in. Straight ahead was my bedroom. The next room to mine was much narrower, also looking out onto the back garden. This was the residence of my little brother, Merlin, who started...