‘Ah BuKien wants to discuss Aghere for her son,’ my mother announced to my father over breakfast one morning. They spoke as if I wasn’t there, but they expected me to eavesdrop. This woman, a family friend of my parents, had been intent on seeing me marry her son ever since she had lain eyes on me as a shapeless pre-pubescent in my mother’s hand-me-downs. My father laughed. Ha, the absurdity of it. He thought I was too good for Ah BuKien’s son. ‘That crazy antiquated relic thinks she’s still living in Confucian times,’ my father sneered. ‘She doesn’t realise […]

When I was little I was always very interested in big women who shamelessly mentioned their knickers in front of my father. These women sometimes sang fragments of music, often quite difficult passages in which there might be two violins, a cello, a trumpet and a drum roll, for my mother to identify for them. My mother never made a mistake as she listened to the extraordinary noises which emerged from the massed instruments inside their heads. ‘Ah! Beethoven of course!’ The visitors were very grateful, ‘that tune’s been on my brain all week.’ My father always looked across to […]

It’s extraordinary to look back, over all those years. I remember, as a child, looking forward to a stretch of time that seemed endless, a point that, as I gazed at the nearest elderly relative, was beyond her comprehension, or possibility of attainment. Well, I’m there now, or almost, and this exercise in recollection, albeit purely in the professional areas, will be interesting and, given my current feelings (disappointments, still lingering hopes?), quite salutary. I remember, vividly, the first moment, entering what was then the St James Hall. Later it became the Mercury Theatre and, finally, its greatest glory, the […]

Dear Editor, I am sitting in P’s study, at the solid commodious desk which you know so well; it has a glass top under which he has stuck picture postcards from all over Europe. It is Friday, 23 August, night is falling: the fourth night after the invasion. I have spent the day, as I spent the others since the Russians came here, walking the streets of Prague and talking to friends in this most beautiful of old cities. Several times I have crossed Charles Bridge where we stood with you and Nina—how long ago was it, only about a […]

My freedom from certain fears does not include tolerance of snakes. From infancy my elders implanted in me: their own fear of these reptiles and it took root and grew to an unconquerable revulsion. Even pictured snakes horrify me; the presence of one where I could not escape it would surely reduce me to a paralyzed jelly in terror. Today in areas where snakes are not known the slightest rustle in grass or underbrush will cause me involuntarily to spring away from it. ‘Dear me, what a state your nerves must be in!’ someone will remark, but it is merely […]

When I returned to London, in 1910, it was with a little more assurance than I had felt a few years earlier. Then I had been intensely conscious of my youth, my lack of experience, my incapacity for anything but a kind of literary beachcombing, gathering fragments for obscure publishers — The Proverbs of Japan, The Proverbs of China, The Potted Policy of Parnell. Through a chance meeting with Lionel Lindsay in Sydney I had been admitted to an attic near the British Museum that had once sheltered him and had still one of his abandoned self-portraits on the wall. […]