My mother wasn’t helping matters by repeatedly saying, ‘How marvellous! How clever of her! What an amazing school! Wonderful Hannah!’ I wanted to bang the table and establish one important fact: let’s not forget that Hannah shows the boys her vagina!

So, puffed up by her own crowing, Dr. Rhys Evans eventually turned to my mother, lips stretched into an unmoving letterbox slot, eyes fixed on my mother’s cut shins, and said, ‘All right, Mrs. de Cadenet. Are you ready?’

I haven’t told you about Mrs. de Cadenet, have I, Dr. R? Let me try and summarize. My mother is a warrior. She has always been fearless. She swam across lakes, she dived off rocks, she lit fires, I saw her break the neck of a dying rabbit with her bare hands, she galloped on horses, she climbed trees, she peed in bushes (or worse), she would think nothing of approaching strangers, of fixing plugs or changing tyres, of sunbathing topless, of disputing authority. She prized initiative above all else and nothing annoyed her more than when we didn’t show it. We didn’t have boundaries like other kids did. It wasn’t a considered thing; it was just the way she was. She had been brought up in the wilds of Northumberland under a rule of benign neglect, which she considered normal parenting.

She adored my father and he was indeed adorable. He was a fusty old academic who didn’t really notice what we, or she, were up to. In fact, he didn’t really notice anything at all if it wasn’t in Latin. (A favourite pastime for David and me was to blindfold him and get him to describe what he was wearing. He would never have the slightest idea at all – I mean, not at all. I’m wearing my tennis clothes, he’d say proudly, sitting there in a three-piece suit.) Which probably explained why we lived where we lived: in an armpit of north London. They could have moved if they wanted to, but it didn’t seem to bother them that our house was the only one in the street that wasn’t derelict, or run-down council accommodation, or a squat, or a drug den, or the Hare Krishna house (goodness, Ganesha, did they like a drum and chant) or – somewhat bizarrely – a convent.