I slammed down the iron, feeling foolish. ‘Trying to get rid of my curls.’ The picture on the cover of one of my romance novels showed a glamorous woman with long, wavy hair falling over her shoulders.

‘You’ll do that soon enough if you scorch them to a frazzle, dearie,’ she said. ‘And what’s wrong with them lovely curls?’

‘They’re childish,’ I said, feeling even sillier.

Mrs D put down her bucket with a kindly sigh and went out into the scullery. She returned with her basket and took out a magazine, then sat at the kitchen table turning the pages until she reached the photograph of a beautiful woman with short, dark curly hair.

‘Jean Simmons. One of our most successful actresses – a huge hit in Hollywood these days. Would you say she looks childish?’

‘No, but my hair doesn’t look anything like hers.’

She examined me, tilting my head with a finger. ‘True, but it wouldn’t take too much. Have you got any kirby grips?’

Within quarter of an hour my hair was dampened and coiled into sections pinned flat to my head. Now all we had to do was wait until it dried. Mrs D didn’t actually explain why forcing it into curls would make it less curly, but she was right, as she so often was. A couple of hours later she took out the hairpins and gently brushed and stroked my hair into what were now gentle waves rather than tight curls. It looked so much more sophisticated, and even distracted attention from the wonky eyebrows.

Wormley Hall was possibly the prettiest house in the whole world, but it hid its charms behind a long winding driveway with tall hedges. Although I had already glimpsed its tall brick chimneys peeping over the tops of the trees, nothing prepared me for what came into view as we walked round the last bend of the drive.

‘It’s a moat, Pa!’ I almost shouted. ‘With water in it and everything.’

Jimmy rushed ahead and I chased after him, as best I could in my tight skirt. A family of ducks scattered, rising into the air with a noisy chorus of alarm calls. ‘Nothing like advertising our arrival,’ Pa said.

Most people think beauty lies in symmetry. At least that’s what women’s magazines say about faces. But Wormley Hall disproves the point. It is all higgledy-piggledy, with extra bits added on over the centuries: a porch here, a double-stacked chimney there, a couple of dormer windows in that roofline, a single-storey outhouse to the side.