I am about to find a place to live! This morning, after a rather disappointing breakfast of bread, margarine and apricot jam, plus very watery coffee (making me appreciate the Pensione Regina and even the convent), I put on my grey dress with the broad white collar, my white hat trimmed with navy blue ribbon and white gloves and set out for the academy. The woman at the front office rattled off a string of Italian phrases so quickly at me that I couldn’t understand a word.

“Could you please speak more slowly? I am just arrived from England,” I said.

She sighed, as if speaking more slowly was a big inconvenience for her. “What do you want?” she asked. “The art gallery is next door. This is the school.”

I explained, in carefully thought-out sentences, who I was and that I was a visiting student, wishing to enrol. Again she looked at me as if she couldn’t believe that a woman of my age would be a student, but then sent me upstairs to the registrar’s office. I went up the flight of broad marble steps, savouring the touch of my hand on the cool marble banister. The woman in the registrar’s office was more friendly. She was assigned to help foreign students, she said. She spoke slowly and clearly and had a little English for when I didn’t understand. She handed me a list of classes and told me that I could choose up to three. It was like looking at a delicious menu in a top restaurant. History of Painting. Drawing and Painting the Nude. Workshop on Colour. Painters of the Sixteenth Century. Working with Clay. Metal Sculpture.

I would like to have taken every one but decided that realistically I should not take sculpture classes since I had no experience in that medium. I therefore selected Drawing and Painting the Nude, which was something I would have done in my second year at the Slade, Beginning Oil Painting and Painting with Freedom of Expression. Maybe I’d learn to be a Picasso after all!

Then we moved on to finding a place for me to live. I was lucky, she told me. Usually Venice is packed at this time of year with visiting tourists. But this year so many people are afraid to travel, especially visitors from England, now that Italy has signed the non-aggression pact with Germany. “Let us hope there is no war,” she added. “We lived through the last one, did we not? How many men died needlessly, and for what? Nothing changed except we all became poorer and lost hope.”

I nodded. I wanted to say that my father was gassed, but the words were not in my vocabulary and I didn’t want to admit defeat and switch to English.