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From my earliest years I had been assured of my father’s love. He always seemed pleased to see me, to spend time with me, to laugh at my jokes. He took me to Hampstead
Heath and Richmond Park. Sometimes we’d drive to Sussex together, and I’d sing him all the songs I knew and he would just drive and listen, and when I glanced at him there was always a
small smile beneath his moustache. He called me Jinny and the name stuck for years, in spite of my mother insisting that it should be Jenny. On these drives, he would stop at Tonbridge at a
handmade-chocolate shop, and he would buy five or six pounds of truffles, and coffee and violet creams – he never did that sort of thing by halves.

On my mother’s Red Cross evenings, I’d dine in state with him – he had always given me wine from the age of four when I was, in his view, old enough, and he would tell me the
provenance and vintage of the claret, burgundy and port that we drank and would subsequently test my memory. After dinner he would play his gramophone, which had a huge horn and required thorn
needles. He once started the Pathétique Symphony and I wept. He stopped at once, and he asked me what was the matter. I answered that it was too sad. ‘He was a sad
bloke
,’
he said, ‘but he wrote wonderful stuff.’ When I was about fourteen, he took me to the theatre to see a musical piece called
The Two Bouquets
. I remember that the very young
George Cole was in it, and that the setting was Edwardian with parasols and pretty dresses, but nothing else. Afterwards we went across the road to the Ivy restaurant, where we had a wonderfully
grown-up supper. ‘I expect one day I shall come and see you acting in a theatre,’ he said, ‘if I’m not too old.’

‘If you are, I’ll wheel you about in the mornings, toothless and
dribbling in a bath chair.’ His laughs made the waiters glance at him smilingly: I noticed
how they always liked and served him well. Going out with him I noticed that everyone liked him. He would park his car right outside the restaurant, and the commissionaire would touch his hat and
say, ‘Very good, sir,’ when asked to look after it. The programme girl would give him a dazzling smile and the head waiter would offer him his choice of table. He looked glamorous and
wonderful in his dinner jacket, and he treated me as a treasured grown-up. I loved him. He would introduce me as his eldest unmarried daughter. ‘But, Dad, you haven’t
got
any
other daughter!’

‘Nor I have. It slipped my mind.’

He bought me a wonderful crimson velvet cloak lined with crimson satin that touched the ground for my fourteenth birthday: the most beautiful thing I’d ever possessed.

My father loved sailing, and he acquired a small 30-foot yawl called
Wych
. He kept her on the Hamble river with a crewman called Godden. Godden looked after the boat, and went in her with
my father and mother, his chief duties being to prepare the meals and look after the small engine whenever the wind failed. I never liked it. The process of cruising to A, then to B, then back
again seemed pointless and unenjoyable. We never really
went
anywhere.

My dislike of the whole business culminated one awful weekend when my father had taken me sailing on my own. We set out for Cowes in the morning. There was a slow, heavy swell and I felt queasy.
At lunchtime, Godden presented us with tinned grapefruit, whose surface was decorated with an iridescent spot of engine oil. Tinned crab followed. Godden, always cheerful and chatty, emerged from
the galley to say, ‘Do you ever get ’ot, sir?’ My father agreed that he did. ‘When I get ’ot, I get so
salty
. I can scrape the salt from under my arms with a
knife.’ When he had gone my father shrugged and smiled, but I couldn’t finish the crab.

Eventually we moored. This was only Saturday, I thought. There was a whole Sunday to be endured. I became more and more
silent, until my father asked me what was the matter,
whereupon I broke down. ‘I don’t like sailing,’ I wept, ‘I
hate
it.’

My father was aghast, but he rose to the occasion. He put his arms round me, and said we could go ashore; we’d have a lovely time in Cowes and he would take me out to tea. He did. But
first he took me on a buying spree. He bought me an autograph book, and a pen and a lovely shiny exercise book to write in and other things that I can’t now remember. We had tea and I cheered
up. He was extraordinarily kind and gentle and didn’t make me feel anything was my fault. With him I never felt plain or clumsy or intellectually not up to the mark: he was simply
affectionate, easy, undemanding company. Until, without warning, he ceased to be any of those things.

It’s difficult to write about early shock without hindsight but I have, until now, tried to avoid any older, more experienced conclusions. Here I have to fail. At some time during my
fifteenth year, my father stopped treating me as a child. I can’t remember the exact circumstances of his first assault. We must have been alone, and it was evening. Anyway, one moment he was
remarking on how fast I was growing up and the next minute I was caught in his arms, one hand hurting my breast, and stifled by what I afterwards learned was a French kiss. There was a timeless
struggle, until I managed to break free and fled. This recurred several times until I learned never to be alone with him. Nothing was ever said about it. I snubbed his attempts at ordinary
affection, which incurred my mother’s displeasure. I felt so frightened and betrayed by him that any endearment increased my fear: sometimes I simply hated him. I also felt too ashamed of
what had happened to tell anyone about it. This state persisted until I was married.

I didn’t realize then the damage that had been caused. Long before I began to reconcile myself to that, I understood that he loved me as a father – that his was a very sexual nature
– that
he
had suffered shocks when not much older than I was then, and that as a consequence he had never, in some senses, grown up. He loved
me, and when I ceased
to be a little girl he simply added another dimension to his love. This was irresponsible and selfish, but it wasn’t wicked. So at the time the signals I received from my parents were that
sex, or anything to do with the body, was disgusting and that sex in any explicit form was horrible. This was to influence the next thirty years of my life.

My fifteenth year was the last I spent with Miss Cobham. Carol’s mother had decided that her daughter should leave and spend two terms at a domestic science school, and
it was my idea that I should accompany her. The main reason for this was my appalling homesickness when removed from either home. I’d reached the point where I could just about manage to
spend a weekend with the Beddingtons in their cottage near Princes Risborough, but even that was something of an ordeal.

It wasn’t going to be possible to be an actress if I couldn’t leave home, so somehow this weakness had to be conquered. My terror of a possible war had been inflamed and then
dissolved by the Munich crisis in the autumn of 1938, and homesickness seemed to be the next hurdle.

We went in the summer term of 1939 when I’d just turned sixteen. At least it wasn’t an ordinary school. I didn’t have to wear uniform. And I was going with Carol. Everyone is
familiar with the miserable sensation of a dreaded future sliding slowly towards them – an event that looms inexorably nearer, larger and blacker until it blots out any sense of proportion,
until there is almost a relief at its actual presence. By the time I reached the school, driven there by my father’s chauffeur and trying to weep silently in the back of the car, I’d
temporarily exhausted all feeling and lived the first few days with a kind of watery curiosity about the place. There were about forty girls, mostly older than I; they wore makeup and smart clothes
and seemed to me indescribably glamorous. The school was at Seer
Green, near Beaconsfield, and as the course was only two terms, at least half of the pupils were as new as
myself. But it didn’t feel like that, and I soon realized that as they had all spent half their lives at boarding-schools they knew the ropes.

We were taught by the simple method of everybody practising in turn every branch of domestic science. There was no theory: we ate what we cooked, wore what we laundered, did all our own
housework and cleaning. Twin sisters, the Misses Laidler, ran the school and the members of staff were mostly related to each other and very good at their work. The girls were a disappointment to
me as I found them unconscionably dull. I’d been used to the company of people very much older than myself, or of a few friends whose interests were much the same as my own. I was sixteen,
had violent ambitions and was narrow-minded. Faced with people whose interests and opinions I was totally unable to discover or understand, I became a prig about them. Leaving aside any discussion
of the reasons for life, the future of the theatre, or the comparative merits or pleasures of art, I couldn’t even have a good conversation about submarines or snakes.

What was there left to talk about? They discussed their schools, and the variations of routine there; their personal appearance – hair, makeup and clothes – and, most frivolous and
unseemly of all,
men
, from Ivor Novello to a friend of their brother’s at school. Their futures, I used to ask desperately: what were they going to
do
? Visions of my own packed
professional life – to begin the moment I was seventeen – would float impatiently before me. Some were going abroad, and some were staying at home, but to my dismay nearly all of them
ended by saying, ‘And then I shall come out.’

At some point during term in 1939, Gielgud produced and played
Hamlet
at the Lyceum Theatre, this time to commemorate jointly Henry Irving and the closing of his theatre. I went to the
headmistress and intimated that this was a piece of theatrical history that absolutely required my attendance. She heaped fuel on to my little cultural torch and took me and a large party of
anybody
who wanted to go, asking me to give a résumé of the play before we went. I did this with mingled feelings of self-importance and incredulity that so many
people should be ignorant of and indifferent to such a play.

Although I must in many ways have been intolerable, what with prostrating bouts of homesickness alternating with intellectual priggishness, the staff liked me, and the girls regarded me with
amiable tolerance as brainy and eccentric. In fact, the easy time I had at that school is as much a mystery to me as the hard time I had at the other. I shared a room with Carol, and our natural,
equable relationship continued: we discussed a great deal with passionate ignorance and laughed at each other when this became apparent.

Carol and I believed in God. I think that she influenced me here. For about two years before we went to Seer Green, we’d both been going to church. I can’t remember our going
together, partly, I suppose, because she usually went away with her parents at weekends. I used to go to the eleven o’clock service at St John’s church in Ladbroke Grove. I went by
myself: my mother never commented. I sat at the back of the church, and I never talked with the vicar. For Carol, her faith seemed a joyous business; for me it was fraught with anxiety. At the Seer
Green school Miss Laidler asked everyone whether they wished to attend church in Beacons-field on Sundays, and I elected to go. The Anglican service was very High Church, with incense, and the
priest who officiated was interested in his parishioners. I began to feel more fervent and went regularly.

Something else happened that first term, which had far-reaching consequences for me. We were allowed two weekends at home, and the first time I returned, there was a girl, not much older than
me, who my mother explained was living with us. She came from a large family in Westmorland and knew my Somervell relations, so when she came to London to study at the Royal College of Music, it
was suggested that she should lodge with my family. Her name
was Dosia (pronounced Doshia) Cropper. She told me later that my mother had said I might feel jealous and put out to
find her living there, but this was not so. I loved her at once, and after sixty years we are still great friends. She was funny, full of life, and altogether charismatic; everybody who knew her
felt the better for it. She also played the piano extremely well, and I had a healthy respect for good pianists. Not beautiful, she was intensely attractive, and she had a dashing personality that
I very much wished I had myself.

Musical life at home was rich and Harold Craxton’s pupils were often there. They used to come to supper, then play in turns, and it was electrifying. It was hard to go back to school on
Sunday evenings, but this slowly got easier. That first term I learned how to turn out a room, goffer a surplice, make pastry, bread, pies, tarts and soufflés, how to order appropriate cuts
of meat from the butcher, lay a table properly and interview a servant – beginning with ‘What is your religion?’

Then came the summer holidays before the war. By now, there were so many of us that we overflowed into other housing provided by my grandfather – a barn that he had converted into a house,
a small unconverted cottage with an outside privy, and a pair of cottages that he renovated for himself, my grandmother and Aunt Ruth. People came and stayed: I particularly remember Harold and
Essie Craxton because I’d developed a romantic passion for Harold, and his visits were a highlight. I loved him in a devoted and adoring way; just to be in a room with him was rapture. I
painstakingly knitted him a sleeveless blue pullover that he loyally wore on these occasions. Harold made me play ‘The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba’ with him; he wrote some exercises
and one was dedicated to me – what more could I ask? I was perfectly content with this amount of attention and affection, wanted nothing more.

I’d reached that amorphous age when I was neither child nor adult. I stopped playing children’s games, stopped reading in apple trees
and
building tree-houses, and only climbed one special tree when I wanted to get away from everyone. I played countless games of squash with my cousin Dana, and tennis with uncles and aunts and older
cousins. We went to the beach to bathe and to Camber to collect bottle glass. We went blackberrying, and in the early mornings collected mushrooms that grew plentifully in our field and Mr
York’s. I read. I worried about my straight hair; spent hours scrunching up strands of it in lead curlers that were hard and knobbly to sleep on. I experimented with Tangee lipstick, which
looked bright orange but on your mouth became bright pink. I’d been promoted to dining with the grown-ups and bought a housecoat of aquamarine furnishing-brocade with long sleeves and a large
collar that I changed into every evening. I now had an allowance of forty-two pounds a year with which to buy my clothes, hair ribbons and anything else I needed. I was growing at a great rate, was
thin and gawky and still clumsy – someone in the family had nicknamed me Bump, which I hated. My brother Colin had always called me Dee-dee when he was a baby, but changed this to Deeds, as
he didn’t wish to sound babyish.