It was a perpetual source of regret to me at the age of ten that my parents were so boringly agreeable. My attempts to persuade my friends that my father, in reality the mildest of men, was a violent sadist, who regularly whipped me with his cane while uttering the sinister words, ‘I’ve got Tickler here!’ (cribbed by me from the children’s version of Great Expectations) met with a fascinated half belief, but what I really wanted was a Worldly Mother. Children in the Victorian stories to which I was much addicted often boasted one of these. They were generally only seen on their way out to a society dinner ‘in a soft satin dress and pearls, tall and stately but somewhat cold in expression’. Edith Fowler, author of The Young Pretenders, first published in 1895 and now reissued by Persephone Books with the original Philip Burne-Jones illustrations, preferred a Worldly Aunt. Aunt Eleanor is ill-suited to take charge of Teddy and Babs on the death of their grandmother and in the absence of ‘Father-and-Mother-in-India’, when the children arrive to live with her and their Uncle Charley in London. She is disappointed by the homely appearance of her little niece: ‘Oh, how I do wish she had been a doll! It would have been fun to have dressed her. I like the look of a pretty little girl in a victoria.’

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