Summertime memories, when we lived in the South. Sunshine and gardenias, and once a spray of lilac that Mama laid in my perambulator. But this was a very long time ago and so, naturally, many of my memories have become blurred. I recall Papa coming home from a trip to the East – he was always away on trips – and beckoning me into his study. There on his big, heavy, dark desk was a box, all covered in strange writing. He pulled me up onto his knee and nodded towards the box, smiling beneath his big black beard. I put out my hands – I was perhaps six or seven – and I lifted the cardboard lid. It made a very satisfying, trumpety noise, I recall.

Inside, wrapped in tissue, lay a very pretty frock – sky blue with little yellow flowers embroidered around the hem. I had never been so happy in my little life.

I got down and held up the dress before me. And then I saw Mama standing in the study doorway. There was look on her face – a sort of thunderous frown – which she often had.

And then they began to row again. Because it is not just the sights I recall. It is the sounds.

The sounds of crashing crockery and raised voices and furious argument.

Yes, there was that familiar look of Mama’s. I imagine she has that look still, though, of course, I can no longer see it.

I had a private tutor – Professor Bywaters – who ensured my vowel sounds remained unpolluted by any egregious Northern flattening, and who became the closest thing I had to a friend. I was a lonely child. I was to become a lonely woman.

It was not long after that it happened – Mama told me all about it in the infirmary many weeks later when the bandages came off. Of how Papa had returned home, insensible with drink and taken out his rage on me, mixing together some of Mama’s chemical compounds into a calamitous mixture that exploded in my poor face. And it was not long after that that Papa ‘went before’. He had lately returned from the Belgian Congo and must have picked up some dreadful local malady, taking to his bed with sweats and brain fever and though Mama ministered to him daily – always making sure he drank the special cordial she prepared for him – he rapidly declined. He departed this veil of tears just after Michaelmas 1859 in ‘an appalling torrent of mucal excess’, as Mama told me the next morning over the kedgeree.