The Long Vacation

Journalist and author Rosemary Dinnage grew up in the lavish surroundings of Oxford's Rhodes House. The whole of arch-imperialist Cecil Rhodes - the English, he said, were "the finest race in the world and the more of the world they inhabit the better" - was incorporated in the massive building with its library, lecture rooms and marble portico. In their top-floor nursery Rosemary and her brother were attended by a series of nannies and ate wholesome meals sent up the lift from the kitchen. It was lavish but often lonely, when parents were away during vacations on Rhodes business or holidays. During the second world war, like many other children, she crossed a dangerous Atlantic as an evacuee, returning in 1943 to neutral Portugal. She describes later life as a single parent, then a progress towards what she call "the fringe of the literary world", glad to write for leading journalists.