The deep sorrow of losing a sibling

My sister died last summer, before her time, at 58. Her death has left me shaken with sorrow and remorse: we did not always get on. The other day I accompanied her daughters and husband to scatter her ashes on the Thames at Greenwich in south London where she and I had grown up. The great muddy waterway would take Clare’s ashes out to sea eventually.

People like Liz Truss live in Greenwich now, but in my time the inhabitants were Labour-voting bohemian types. Daniel Day-Lewis (a brattish schoolboy) lived down the road from us on Crooms Hill with his poet father Cecil. At Greenwich Theatre opposite, Max Wall performed his anarcho-comic piano sketches on Friday nights. Claire Tomalin was a near neighbour (as was, later, Jonathan Sumption). In those days, wonderfully, a Soviet Russian hydrofoil service ferried commuters upriver from Greenwich to Westminster pier – a goodwill gift to the ‘People of Greenwich’ from the ‘People of Leningrad’.

In 1968 my mother, an antiques dealer, restored the family home at 52 Crooms Hill with the help of a Greenwich council grant. Even in its dilapidated state, the Grade II-listed medieval croft went by the reassuringly bucolic name of The Grange. At the far end of the garden was a gazebo designed by an associate of Sir Christopher Wren. And in wasteland behind the house was a disused London Electricity Board substation where a man called Antony Gormley had a studio. (Gormley used to drop by for tea and to borrow tea bags.)

To my child’s eye, The Grange was a gloomy pile with cobwebbed cellars and needlepoint holes in the woodwork where termites had been dining; still, it had a history. Samuel Pepys visited during the 1665 plague when the house belonged to the alderman (later, the Lord Mayor) of London, Sir William Hooker.