When I was a child, my aunt, Pat R., had a rich boss. She went to America with him on a cruise, and when she came back she brought amber perfume in bottles shaped like crowns. These she kept on the windowsill of the room she rented in her brother’s house. She suffered excruciating bouts of tonsillitis, and had it so badly on her return from America that her tonsils obstructed her throat. It was said in the family that they had gone septic due to a lifelong proneness to infection brought on by poor nutrition during the Depression.

My father was her younger brother. He took me to visit her in a posh hospital when she had her tonsils out. Her room overlooked a bandstand in a little park in Paddington and was filled with expensive flowers: freckled orange tiger lilies with perfect cake-blade petals and slender leaves that had never seen a snail or slug. At the time, there was one gladiolus out in our garden at Concord. It was magenta. An aunt on my mother’s side had given us the corm. ‘They’re very expensive,’ my mother said. The magenta gladiolus was her pride and joy.