To this day my father swears that he was as innocent as Adam of knowledge of any other woman, had never even heard of anyone called Lucetta, and that his whispering for her in his first sleep as a husband was just another example of that atrocious luck that has dogged him all his life when it comes to remembering my mother’s name. God knows whether he is telling the truth. Certainly my mother did her best to understand the sorts of associative confusions that might have been behind her receiving anniversary flowers accompanied by a card ‘To my darling Rose’, and gifts of jewellery on her birthday ‘For Golda’. But I know for a fact that she had never been happy about the letters my father sent her all those years ago from Germany – he had entered Hamburg with the British 2nd Army, just a month before my fifth birthday – addressed to ‘Liebe Helga’.

In fairness to him it must be said that he has made no better a job of remembering the names of my wives. The only time he got my first one’s right was on the day I was marrying my second. ‘Here’s to Barney and Sharon,’ he proposed, raising a tumbler of champagne, for all the world the proudest and the happiest of fathers-in-law; only Sharon had not, for reasons to do with good taste, been invited. Camilla – how vividly I recollect it! – roared with amusement. But she was capable of doing something like that while having her own thoughts.

The odd thing about this idiosyncrasy of my father’s is that names are in a sense his living. I’ve never known what precisely he does in that comfortable room of his in Somerset House, directly above a Tuscan column and with wide views over the Thames, except that he is involved in some way with births and birth certificates. In earlier times, when his job was new to him and he had a young family to entertain, he would come home, take off his coat, and without further preliminary explanations rattle off the latest batch of cruel and comic christenings, the day’s dirty tricks that parents had played upon their children. ‘Ivor Soredick,’ he would say, as we all fussed around him, bringing him tea and helping him off with his shoes. ‘Greta Warmley, Eva Brick, Nelson McCollum, Noah Arkwright, Ava Crisp, Russell Spring, Albert Bridge, Clyde Banks, Treta Wright, Atossa Day.’ And after supper, if we were lucky, he might remember some more. ‘Mavis Sphincter, Nola Blower, Rosina Hattrick, Yule Grocock, Rosy Titball, Neil Downs, Melvyn Bragg, Carrie Waters, Ellen Evans, Willie Wanklyn, Montague Gaylord, Butch Walker, Patricia Plaything.’