I think a brief note on my travelling experiences might be appropriate here. My family had strong links with the Continent. My father, though born in England, had been at school and later had worked for many years in Germany and Switzerland between the wars. He had many friends and connections all over Europe.

After he retired officially from the university, he was very worried for a while about how he could keep a family, still quite young, on the small academic retirement pension. My mother earned very little in her psychoanalytic practice, with just a few patients, seen in our home. However, my father’s expertise soon meant that he became involved as a Consultant for all sorts of electrical engineering projects and was paid a generous retainer by Kennedy and Donkin to attend conferences in Britain and the Continent. With his facility in languages and his liking for committee work, he thoroughly enjoyed this and we were much better off in those years.

I was largely shielded from these financial anxieties and their relief. I was used to a middle-class academic lifestyle that was comfortable but not flashy. I took it very much for granted, including the fact that I was completely supported financially until my medical training was over, in my mid-twenties. However, in casual enquiries I discovered that the amount my father supplied for me to live on was actually less than those of my friends on educational grants. 

When I turned 16, my father opened an account in Barclays Bank for me and I stayed within my allowance for all personal expenditure. Soho coffee bars were cheap if you made one cup last, so were some of the new and exciting Chinese restaurants and my tastes were simple.

For most of my early childhood, our summer holidays were always to Wales, and they were magical. My parents had of course ‘discovered’ the West Wales coast during the war and were happy to take us there for our annual summer holiday, to a guest house in Rhossili on the Gower peninsula. We explored all the beaches, collected shells, made sandcastles—all the usual things. One unique pleasure though was to allow ourselves to be ‘marooned’ on the Worm’s Head, which was mostly cut off from the mainland by the sea, but connected by a causeway at low tide. We children adored the frisson of adventure, from favourite books like ‘Treasure Island’. We loved the business of collecting wood, lighting a fire, cooking and eating our food and exploring, then coming back in the late afternoon-evening light, as the tide receded, to the surprised stares of the next batch of tourists, those lazy onlookers to whom we children could feel superior. My parents were very good-natured about it, as I think it may have been quite boring for them!

In spring 1951, aged 13, I had to have my tonsils and adenoids out. I felt very ill and miserable after it, and I was taken away on holiday by my Auntie Phyllis. She and Auntie Joyce were my mother’s unmarried younger sisters, who I knew only from Christmas and other family reunion times. Phyllis Wilkins was another of those pioneering survivors of the First World War, who never married but made good use of the relaxation of (some of) the barriers to education and careers for women. She became an English literature teacher, then a Head Mistress, then an Inspector of Schools. 

I had found her a little awe-inspiring, even intimidating, compared to her younger sister Joyce, but she turned out to be wonderful company. She was recovering from a major operation and we had an unforgettable fortnight in a coastal resort, going on gentle walks, playing with sand, eating ice creams and reading poetry together in the evenings. I think she introduced me to a lifetime favourite at this time—TS Eliot, by means of his humorous poetry. I devoured books in those days, especially poetry and fairy tales, and I thrived in her company. 

I spent some time with her later on in short visits to her flat in Newcastle upon Tyne, as well as at family gatherings. I am so glad I did, as she died a few years later of cancer and I would never have got to know her—whereas Auntie Joyce lived well into her 90s and became my surrogate mother as an adult.

The first time my parents took us abroad as a family was when I was 9 and again when I was 11, the two mostly blurring into one. We travelled to many places, always by train, always staying in nice, friendly inns and meeting my father’s old friends, many of whom were artists and musicians. My father had worked for the engineering firm Brown-Boveri in Switzerland and had been a close friend of the ‘Brown’ boys, sons of the founder. 

On one trip I remember we visited the Swiss house of Mr Brown’s widow. I remember a sweet, dignified old lady in an incredible, beautiful house. It was full of collector’s items, including a room full of Canalettos, and many early works of the Impressionist painters, collected even before they became famous. I remember how kind and welcoming she was—also the delicious cakes for tea! Of course, I knew little or nothing about art at that time, but the original works by Renoir in her own private gallery also made a great impression on me. 

My father had told me that the Browns had started collecting work by these artists when they were young and not well off, mostly before the works were valuable and before they themselves became rich. I think that house did trigger in me a lifelong appreciation of art as something to live with for itself, not just its price. 

Mind you, I’m as susceptible to bribery as anyone else. I suspect that it was after that visit that my father devised a fail-proof system for encouraging our cultural development—the offer of a nice tea with cake and ice cream if we consented to visit galleries and museums willingly and could pass a small quiz afterward. I continued to be a very willing participant in family holidays well into my early twenties, when my mother’s declining health curtailed their own travel. The ‘bribe’—bless them—was simply that they paid for the holiday, but it was a nice way of being with them in itself. 

Cake and ice cream are now optional, but—you never know—might still succeed easily as a persuader for me…

My parents certainly also brought us up to be independent. I was sent on holiday to the French riviera on my own for the first time at the age of 14, rising 15 and just before going off to boarding school. I can’t imagine letting a child do that quite so young now, but they arranged it very safely. I was met off the train in Paris by one of my father’s old friends and spent the night at their family home, before being put on the train south, to be met there. It was a musical and cultural Summer School, and I certainly have quite magic memories of that too.

I felt to be a seasoned traveller on the return trip and I remember chatting to a man on the train most of the way back to Paris. I had been brought up with good old-fashioned values for social exchanges. That is, to be courteous and friendly to everyone, whatever class or race, but without ever putting oneself forward or showing off. Behaving in a shy or awkward way in company was also not to be tolerated—since it should always be about putting the other person at ease, not about thinking of the impression oneself was giving. 

So this very pleasant middle-aged man and I spent an agreeable journey talking about books and music and—more particularly—about painting. I found him to be full of information about my favoured Impressionist artists, but also interested in my own, naive, views about them.

At the Paris railway station, we parted and he shook my hand ceremoniously, handing me his card and thanking me for the pleasure of my company. My mentor collected me, and I told him about my pleasant journeying companion, giving him the card. 

“Mon Dieu!” he exclaimed, startled. “Do you know who that was? Only the best art critic in all France—the Art Editor of Le Figaro!”