But having a mother to ourselves couldn’t continue in houses as grand as the ones we lived in. Not that I knew then that they were grand. However, I soon came to understand that there were too many rooms for our mother to take care of, too much fine food to be prepared for too many fine evenings for too many teethy people. There were too many dresses, too much finery to think about. Suits to be sent for cleaning day after day. Shoes. Hairdos. Our mother was already beautiful and didn’t need appointments, dresses, sparkly things to make her so.

It became necessary for other people, not our mother, to look after rooms, to cook all day long, to help us dress and take us skating, see us to bed at night, tend to pains and illnesses, watch us riding bicycles, drive us places.

Although I enjoyed our trips to the mountains, it was not so much because I liked to ski. I had no aptitude for it. But I enjoyed our mother staying with us on the slopes, learning along with Janny and me, falling and laughing and getting up again. Our father, too, would stay with us for a day before going off to find elevations more suited to his skill. God of slopes. He has skied all the skiable mountains of the world.

After a while it became inconvenient for him to take Mother, Janny and me along with him, and anyway, by the time we were eleven and twelve my sister and I were ensconced in misery boarding schools, French speaking to improve our language skills.

Though she played the part for several years, the high life didn’t suit Mother. High life was no life, she decided. She needed to work, get her teeth into something. In the same year that we went to boarding school, she began her own study of languages. Already competent in three – three I thought then, I didn’t know about the fourth, which was really her first – she was determined that she would become a licensed interpreter and translator, contracting to important world organisations. This would be her mission in life.

Why German literature? Well, I didn’t choose it. My parents did that for me because they understood that I liked to read, and nothing so far had driven me to choose a course for myself. It was true that I was always compelled to read: light works in spring and summer, heavy in the thick of winter when there’s so much dark and snow to hide from. But it was the reading of books I enjoyed – whether in English, German, French or Danish – not the study of them. Writers and their subconscious didn’t interest me, no matter how involved I became in what they wrote or how interested I became in their manner of telling.