Bronwen Astor: Her Life and Times

Bronwen was not, her sister Ann recalls, a particularly attractive child. ‘She was all eyes, teeth and pigtails. When she was about four, she went off on her bicycle with my mother and when they came back my mother was very upset. Bronwen had had a bad fall. She had managed to pull the muscle at the side of her eye. It left her with a squint which later had to be corrected by surgery, but she still wore glasses.’ There were as yet few signs of her future career on the catwalks. She had to wear a patch over one lens of her glasses to strengthen her eye muscles and later she wore braces to pull her protruding teeth back into line.

She was also, Ann remembers, infuriating. ‘She was always very lively. She’d hide behind the door in the dining room and then when you went in for lunch leap out and say boo! Or else she’d be crawling under the table tickling your feet. She was always on the move, dressing up, play-acting, getting over-excited.’ Bella Wells’s memory is of a very determined three-year-old. ‘On the first day I arrived I took her out in her pram and she just kept saying, “Now can I get out? Now can I get out?” She wanted things her own way.’ One of Bronwen’s greatest delights as a small child was to watch the fire engines going down Hampstead High Street, bells ringing and lights flashing. Her earliest ambition was to be a fireman. It appealed to the theatrical side of her nature. ‘There was the drama of it all, I suppose, and that thing of rescuing people. It must always have been a part of my psyche.’

While Bella Wells was devoted to her charge, mother and daughter had from the start a difficult relationship. Kathleen Pugh’s regret at not having a boy was explicit and was overlaid by personal frustration. She had wanted to find something challenging to do outside the home but Bronwen’s arrival delayed the day when she could seek once again the sense of self-worth that she had enjoyed as a volunteer nurse during the war. She was an intelligent woman: to her husband’s breakfast-table lessons in Welsh she would add her own questions to the children on mental arithmetic. They all learnt early how to keep accounts of how they had spent their pocket money.

Kathleen had finished school at sixteen and, with her staff leaving her with too little to occupy her time in the Hampstead house, she grew bored and occasionally, Ann remembers, impatient with her youngest daughter. Though she had forward-thinking ideas about women’s choices – she had her own car at a time when two vehicles in the family was unusual – Kathleen was by nature a reserved and private person. She mixed with neighbours but had few close friends among them; she found some of the more academic residents of Pilgrims Lane intimidating. She warned her youngest daughter against Dr Donald Winnicott, an eminent child psychiatrist (and the greatest critic of the Truby King method of child-rearing) who lived in the same road, for fear, Bronwen suspects, ‘that he might carry out some strange experiments on us’.

Rather than her reserve throwing her back on her role as a mother, however, it appeared only to exacerbate Kathleen Pugh’s restlessness. Sometimes she could be fun. She taught her youngest daughter to fish – a hobby Bronwen pursues with gusto to this day in the salmon rivers of the Scottish borders. ‘We started off one holiday in Suffolk with a simple piece of string and a weight. You threw it in and waited to see if you caught anything. I must have been six when I caught an eel and I was so pleased.’

Another treat was to raid the dressing-up box with Kathleen or put on a play in the drawing room. Again there was a theatrical element. Their mother was a woman, her daughters recall, who liked, indeed expected, to be entertained by her children; she could grow exasperated if they failed to perform. Yet any frivolous side to her character was strictly rationed. She had an unusual and occasionally cutting sense of humour and for the most part, despite all the Pugh’s progressive ideas, was for Bronwen a rather Victorian figure, distant and dour. She had had a strict Nonconformist upbringing and passed aspects of it on to her children. She would remind them of phrases like ‘the Devil makes work for idle hands’ and circumscribed their lives and her own with peculiar self-denying ordinance like never reading a novel before lunch. Her favourite children’s book was Struwwelpeter, a collection of often brutal, gloomy moral tales about such character as ‘poor Harriet’, who was punished for her wrong-doing by being ‘burnt to a crisp’.

‘My mother was, I now realise, not very child-orientated,’ says Bronwen. ‘I found being with her agony. There was one terrible time when Gwyneth and my father were both away and I had to be with my mother on my own for two weeks. I can only have been six or seven at the time, but once I realised what was happening, I went into a catatonic state. She had to call the doctor. I just sat unable to move for three hours. I was in such a state of shock at the prospect of two weeks on our own. Now it sounds like nothing but then it was a lifetime.’

Siblings experience their parents in different ways and while Bronwen found her mother a cold, distant figure, Ann remembers an entirely separate person with great affection. ‘My mother was not a cuddly sort of person but she was kind and caring.’ Such a divergence of views is not uncommon in brothers and sisters, depending on their temperament and their position in the family. Parents who are strict with their older children, perhaps daunted by the serious business of forming young minds and possibly, at an early stage in their careen, anxious over material matters, become indulgent, relaxed mentors to their younger children, self-confident in then-behaviour and sometimes cushioned by greater financial resources. In Bronwen’s case there was certainly more money around when she was a child and Ann retains the distinct memory that her youngest sister was spoilt and indulged. Yet Bronwen was also aware of a new anxiety in Kathleen Pugh – her desire to break out of the confines of being a stay-at-home parent, which contributed to the temperamental clash between mother and daughter.

Kathleen’s difficult relationship with her youngest and most independent daughter reflected her tense dealings with her own mother, Lizzie Goodyear, who lived on in her Bromley house to the age of ninety-one, surviving her husband by twenty-two years. ‘My mother was scared of my grandmother,’ says Bronwen. ‘I used to be taken to tea when she had to go and visit her mother as a kind of distraction. Out would come the silver and the maid and the cucumber sandwiches-the complete opposite of the way my mother ran our house. So it was wonderful for me but I sensed my mother was terrified.’

Bronwen’s picture of the house in Pilgrims Lane as one that was lacking in warmth is also qualified by Bella Wells, the nanny. ‘There was no hugging or kissing or anything like that. But then not many people would do that then.’ Much later, in an academic paper she wrote ‘Of Psychological Aspects of Motherhood’, Bronwen reflected obliquely on her own experiences: ‘Assuming the child is wanted from the moment of conception – and many of us are not – and is the right gender – again, many of us are not’, the mother’s love, attitude and behaviour are ‘more fundamental to the child’s early formation than that of the father’.

Her perceptions of the absence of that love from her own mother left a deep scar. ‘I could entertain her – go shopping with her, do the crossword – but she made me feel like a thorough nuisance. I’m still always apologising for being a nuisance. I try to stop now that I know. I had my handwriting analysed recently. “Oh, but you’re still running away from your mother,” the graphologist told me. Even now!’

What love she felt – and therefore returned – was all to do with her father. As she grew up, Bronwen knew from an early age that she did not want to be like her mother. ‘I remember deciding, when I was quite young, that I was going to be more graceful than my mother. She never made the best of herself. She never wore make-up and her hair was cut in an Eton crop like a boy.’

Alun Pugh, by contrast, was his daughter’s hero – indeed the hero of all his daughters. ‘We were all devoted to our father,’ says Ann. ‘I can remember as a girl walking down the High Street in Hampstead with him and saying, “What would you do if the house caught fire? Who would you save?” and being heart-broken when he said, “Your mother, of course.”’ He was, she recollects, a charmer, but part of that charm lay in the fact that he was so seldom at home; his work often took him away and he was unpredictable in his hours. He brought an excitement but also an uncertainty to the home with his eccentricity and sense of adventure. He would have great enthusiasms that were utterly impractical. At one stage he decided it would be fun to keep silk-worms and make their own clothes. So Gwyneth and Bronwen made cocoons out of old newspaper and hung them from the ceiling, but when the worms began to produce silk the little hand-spinner their father had made could not cope with the output. ‘It had closed-in ends, so you couldn’t get anything off it,’ says Bronwen. ‘It was typical of my father, this do-it-yourself-and-have-fun-doing-it mentality, but then never to finish it off. He had lots of imagination and was terrific fun. When he emerged from his study at home, the atmosphere would change at once. But he was totally impractical.’

When he was a student, Alun Pugh had made a jelly in a teapot, thinking it would make an interesting shape, but then he couldn’t get it out. It is a useful symbol for most of his schemes. When he imported hives of bees into the garden, he eventually had to abort the project because his wife grew allergic to their sting, though he did manage to make some mead and plenty of honey.

Like Kathleen, Alun Pugh didn’t go in much for hugging and kissing, but as a substitute he took a keen, almost zealous, interest in his children’s progress, forever pushing them to do better and be the best. When Bronwen was twelve she was taken to see Roy Henderson, then a celebrated voice coach. He said she had a pleasant voice and good pitch, and suggested lessons, but when he made it clear she would never sing solo in the great concert halls of the world, Alun Pugh decided against. ‘You do something to get to the top or you don’t bother at all,’ is how his youngest daughter sums up the prevailing attitude.

Singing had been something Alun Pugh associated with his mother, who reputedly had a beautiful voice and played the harp, with her son accompanying her on the piano. Bronwen was also told that physically she resembled her paternal grandmother and this may have contributed to a special closeness between father and daughter that compensated for the alienation between mother and daughter.

With Ann and David away at school, Bronwen and Gwyneth developed an enduring bond. The two would get up to all sorts of mischief and it was Gwyneth who was Bronwen’s chief source of fun in the house. ‘She was always inventing things,’ Bronwen remembers. ‘Once when she was ill in bed, she spent hours building this elaborate system of pulleys and string so that we could send each other messages from bedroom to bedroom. Or she would devise complicated games where she would be the captain and I would be the boatswain. I was always saying, “Ay, ay, captain,” to her. She was in charge.’

The five-year age-gap with Gwyneth meant that the youngest Pugh sibling often had to while away many hours on her own or with her nanny. There were friends in the neighbourhood and cycle rides around the carefree streets of Hampstead, but going to school just before her fifth birthday came as something of a blessing. St Christopher’s was a Church of England primary on the way down Rosslyn Hill from Hampstead into central London. Though the Pughs retained their links to the Welsh chapel, their ordinary practice of religion had become increasingly Anglican. (When he joined up with the Welsh Guards in 1915, Alun Pugh had claimed to have no religious affiliations at all.)

Bronwen’s reports suggest a model pupil, with hints at future interests. From her earliest days she did well at recitation, and was praised in April 1936 as ‘a useful leader of the class’. She joined a percussion band that same year and the only blot on the landscape was her problems with an unusual addition to the otherwise standard curriculum, Swedish drill, where she ‘sometimes lacks control’. At the end of summer term 1937, aged seven, she was put up two classes – into a group where the average age was fourteen months above hers-on account of her excellent progress. She made the transition effortlessly, save for occasional blips in arithmetic – ‘must try to be more accurate’ – and painting – ‘is inclined to use too pale colours’ (both spring term 1939). By the time of her final report from St Christopher’s, her card was Uttered with ‘very goods’ and adjectives like ‘appreciative’, ‘careful’, ‘neat’ and ‘musical’.

She did not return to the local school that autumn. War had broken out in September and her parents decided to send her early to join her sister Gwyneth at boarding school in Wales. The two older Pugh girls had gone at the age of twelve, but in view of the anticipated threat to London by German bombers and Alun Pugh’s own ambitions to join the war effort, it seemed sensible to pack Bronwen off to the comparative safety of north-west Wales and close up the house in Hampstead. It appeared to Bronwen Astor at the time like an awfully big adventure, but later she came to see 1939 as a pivotal moment in her childhood, the end of an age of innocence and plenty and the start of a period when she was continually without the things and people she needed to sustain her.

At the age of seven Bronwen had been invited by a school friend to a birthday party in Bishops Avenue, a leafy street of very large houses in Hampstead, known today as ‘Millionaires’ Row’. ‘Until then I had thought that our house was big, but this was so much bigger than anything I had seen,’ she recalls. ‘It even had a swimming pool, all the things you were supposed to want. Immediately I felt very uncomfortable there. It seemed so cold and unwelcoming.’

She joined in with a game of hide and seek in the garden but ‘I was suddenly aware that I was standing totally alone. Everyone had disappeared and a voice spoke to me and said, “None of this matters. None of these things. Only love matters.”’ It was, as she now describes it, ‘a flash of understanding, that the beautiful house, the lovely garden were not as important as what I had experienced, love. There was a tension in this family that I had felt. It was not a happy home.’

She did not mention the experience to anyone. ‘I knew it was God because it was said with such authority. My father would say prayers at night and I think he probably had a mystical streak. We would go to church on Sundays, where my mother would enjoy singing the hymns, but it never occurred to me to mention it to either of them. I thought it was something that happened to everyone. I wasn’t frightened, but reassured. It highlighted love for me as the most important thing, as my lodestar.’

Sixty plus years on, without any independent confirmation, it is impossible to verify the details of this incident. However, its broader significance is all too clear. Though she didn’t know it at the time, this was the start of what Bronwen later came to map as her spiritual journey and the first glimpse, however fleeting, of a capacity within her to experience and react to feelings, tensions, fears or pain in a physical way.

Chapter Two (#ulink_63ca0a4b-47f3-5089-b3c6-4d2ca4132baf)

The land of my fathers? My fathers can keep it.

Attributed to Dylan Thomas (1914–1953)

The old Dr Williams’ School building has the look of a neglected North Country nunnery, its wide gables sagging down over grey stone walls blackened with age, its windows positioned high off the ground to shut out the prying eyes of the world. Next to the road out of Dolgellau to Barmouth and the North, it is now part of a local sixth-form college, but a weather-beaten plaque over the main entrance recalls its history. ENDOWED OUT OF THE FUNDS OF THE TRUST FOUNDED IN I716 BY THE REVD DANIEL WILLIAMS DD, ERECTED BY PUBLIC SUBSCRIPTION IN 1878.Williams, a wealthy Welsh Presbyterian minister, had wanted to promote primary education in Wales, but once the state took over such provision in the early 1870s, his trustees had redirected their funds to secondary education and established Dr Williams’ School.

Today there may be new tenants and the Welsh Dolgellau has replaced the Anglicised Dolgelley (or Doll-jelly, as the boarders here in the 1930s and 1940s called their host town), but the bleak backdrop to Dr Williams’ has altered little over the centuries. The Wnion river flows into the Mawddach, which widens as it leaves its mountainous hinterland and sweeps out towards the Irish Sea and the sandy beaches of Barmouth and Fairbourne. On both sides of the estuary are rolling hills dotted with isolated farms. Towering above everything else is the vast, bleak, greyish-green lump of Cader Idris, its peak shaped like a horse’s saddle.

For some, notably the eighteenth-century painter Richard Wilson, this was a lyrical and romantic landscape to be celebrated, but after the familiar, crowded, urban environment of Hampstead, with its trees, buses and tamed Heath, north-west Wales must have seemed an alien territory to nine-year-old Bronwen Pugh. This empty and usually rain-swept wilderness was a day’s journey by train from London. A specially designated coach for Dr Williams’ girls took her, chaperoned by her older sister Gwyneth, now one of the seniors at the school, plus other boarders, from the capital up to Ruabon Junction, over the border from Shrewsbury, where they changed on to a now abandoned branch line which snaked through the mountains before descending to the coast via Dolgellau. At the station – now a second-hand clothes shop – they were met and then marched uphill the mile or so to the school building. Trunks had been sent on ahead. Each girl brought only a small overnight bag. It was a spartan start to a spartan life.

The Pughs were remarkably relaxed about their young daughters undertaking what to any parent today would seem an epic and dangerous voyage. At least Bronwen had an older sister with her who knew the ropes. When Ann first went to the school, her mother accompanied her for just half the journey and then left her in the care of the guard. Independence was learnt at an early age. Parental visits to the school were permitted just once a-term and often only their mother came. During the war years, even these dried up. Though Kathleen Pugh had initially put up some opposition to shipping her daughters off to north-west Wales – she would have preferred a more standard girls’ boarding school at Felixstowe – she bowed to her husband’s wishes and the couple, as ever, presented a united front.

The distance from London was so great that any term-time trips back to the capital were out of the question. During the war years Wales was Bronwen’s principal home. Though her father had drilled her Welsh roots into her, young Bronwen had little other experience of the country than that gleaned over a Hampstead breakfast table. Family holidays, in deference to her mother’s wishes, had been taken on farms in Suffolk or at Bognor with Bella Wells.

To describe Dr Williams’ as ‘home’ would be to create a false impression of comfort. It was cold, often damp and the food was no better than adequate. Wartime shortages meant a restricted and meagre diet in the communal dining room. ‘On Fridays, the cook would always produce something the girls called “lucky dip”,’ recalls Margaret Braund, a member of staff from 1944 to 1948. ‘It was basically bread and butter pudding but with whatever else was left over and lying round the kitchen – bits of sandwich, sausages, even a nail once, I think. They hated it and it was truly awful.’

Each day pupils changed seats and eventually table to a predetermined pattern to ensure that they all mixed, under strict supervision. ‘It was regimented,’ Ann recalls, ‘but for me at least it afforded a sense of confidence because you always knew what was going to happen.’ Boarders slept in six- or seven-girl dormitories-or ‘dorm-ies’ – and were again regularly moved round to prevent schoolgirl crushes. Some of the seniors were housed off site in Pen-y-Coed, a building halfway up the hill that faces the school. It was also home to the younger members of staff and therefore had a more relaxed atmosphere.

Sickness was dealt with robustly – a good gargle of Dettol was regarded as enough to put most ailments right. Morning bell rang at seven. There was a quick wash in cold water, with baths strictly by rota once a week. And then on with the uniform. For summer there was a navy tunic, a green and white striped blazer, with green poplin blouse and straw hat; for winter, the same blazer but a green viyella blouse and navy blue velour hat. (The straw hats reputedly were excellent for sifting for gold in the streams around Dolgellau, home then to one of Britain’s few gold mines.) At the weekend it was a thick velvet or shantung green dress, depending on the season.

The Pughs were all put in Cader house, one of the six groupings into which the 300 or so pupils were divided. There were rules, with order marks for good behaviour contributing to honours for one’s house. And there was little indulgence. ‘No magazines or comic papers are to be sent to girls at school,’ stipulated a set of rules sent to the Pughs in 1939, ‘with the exception of the Girl’s Own paper and Riding and Zoo. Permission must be obtained from the headmistress for any other magazine which parents may think suitable.’ The handbook went on to specify that only fawn socks would be allowed, no heels, no garters and no fur trimmings on coats, which must be navy gabardine, lined and waterproof, in deference to the prevailing climate.

The school stands apart from the town. Today it is simply an accident of geography, but in Bronwen’s day the distance had a symbolic value. Town and gown were separate. Dolgellau has long been a bastion of the Welsh culture and Nonconformity. With its winding, narrow streets and grey local stone houses, it was one of the first constituencies to return a Plaid Cymru MP in 1974. Even back in 1939 it was represented by one of the rump of self-consciously Welsh Liberal MPs who followed Lloyd George to the bitter end. The neo-classical Salem Chapel of the Presbyterian Church of Wales, high on the hill above the tiny shopping centre, is still larger and better attended than the squat Anglican church of St Mary’s.

It was to St Mary’s, however, that the English boarders from Dr Williams’ trooped each Sunday for morning service. Alun Pugh may have wanted a Welsh education for his daughters, but despite being in Wales, endowed by a Welsh benefactor and including Welsh language lessons on the curriculum plus a Welsh hymn and an offering on the harp once a week at assembly, Dr Williams’ was effectively a little bit of England in exile. ‘In those days it was as Welsh as any suitable school for us could have got,’ estimates Ann, ‘but that wasn’t saying a great deal.’

In line with its charitable purposes, in addition to its boarders like the Pughs, Dr Williams’ admitted a number of local day girls – around 20 per cent of the total – but these locals remained marginal to the ethos of the school. They were mainly Welsh-speakers – several from hill farms high above Dolgellau – and outside of lessons tended to stick together. Displays of Welsh patriotism were rare enough to merit a special mention. When Bronwen enrolled as a girl guide in November 1942, she told her father: ‘I hope this will console you N’had,* (#ulink_4a9ba51e-1e9a-5756-b86c-f2542119e62d) we are having a Welsh dragon on our shoulders to show that we are Welsh guides and not English.’

Most of the teachers and boarders came from across the border, the majority of the latter from well-to-do Midlands families, attracted by the school’s reputation as quietly progressive. If it was not particularly Welsh, Dr Williams’ did have a name for enlightened attitudes. When Bronwen arrived, its character had been moulded for many years by headteacher Constance Nightingale, who was herself drawn to Quaker ideas and who had established a regime with no corporal punishment and none of the decorum, deportment and decorating lessons that dominated many girls’ boarding schools at this time. She aimed to turn out young women with self-confidence and self-awareness, not debutantes. Persuasion rather than force ensured the smooth running of Dr Williams’ and the pupils, in an age when marriage and children were still regarded as the pinnacle of female ambitions, were encouraged to excel in whatever field attracted them – academic work, sports or, if they wanted, domestic science. The atmosphere was not competitive. There was, for example, no attempt to draw up ‘class positions’ at the end of term to denote the cleverest in the form and to encourage competition.

The curriculum was comprehensive, from scripture to science, Welsh to gardening. What time was left over between prep and lights out at nine was filled with uplifting talks by local worthies and travellers, occasional plays and, on special occasions, gatherings in the. headmistress’s private quarters to listen to the wireless. At weekends it was sports – Dr Williams’, in another progressive gesture, spurned lacrosse in favour of cricket, but embraced the more traditionally female netball, hockey and tennis – guide camps, accompanied walks or bicycle rides along the river from Dolgellau out towards the sea at Barmouth and Tywyn, or up to Cader Idris, and finally, on Sunday evenings, letter-writing to reassure anxious parents.

Bronwen’s first letter home was short, stiff and bland. ‘We’ve arrived. Here is a picture of our dormy. I can’t think of anything else to say but I’ll write soon.’ Looking back now, with her psychotherapist’s training and the benefits of hindsight, she believes she was in shock at the alien world that had greeted her. Gwyneth Pugh revealed how the staff allowed her to break her young sister gently into school life by putting them in the same ‘dormy’ for the first few nights. Then they were separated and Bronwen put with girls nearer her own age, though she was the youngest in her form by two years. ‘I was told that Bronwen was to go to Trem [the junior school],’ Gwyneth wrote home, ‘so I packed all her things and she went off. So although Bronwen is at school, she is quite OK.’

Big sister was still hovering in the background the following February, mentioning to her parents that she had been doing Bronwen’s knitting for her. The same letter displayed a touch of exasperation: ‘Bronwen told me the other day that she had lost David’s Christmas present. So I went up to her dormy, opened the drawer at the top and there it was. “Oh, I never looked in there” was the bright remark.’ She was forever losing things.

Gwyneth’s ‘big sister’ attitude is emblazoned on the page of a letter Bronwen wrote home in November 1942. ‘G is in sick-wing. In fact she has been since Monday. It’s her heart again and she’s been working too hard,’ the youngest Pugh reported. ‘I don’t know what she means by this. She’s a bit potty,’ her older sibling scrawled across the offending section. Yet, heart trouble afflicted Gwyneth for most of her adult life and precipitated her early death.

Realising that leaving home and going off to boarding school at such a tender age could be an emotional wrench the Pughs attempted to provide their last-born with other companions – Thomas and Doreen, two rabbits, substitutes for the family cat, Lancelot, who had been left behind. Both survived only a few short weeks in Dolgellau, but it wasn’t entirely down to the inclement weather. ‘This is, I think, the reason for Doreen’s dying,’ nine-year-old Bronwen told her parents. ‘Last weekend it was absolutely pouring with rain and I hadn’t got an umbrella, so I didn’t go to feed them. And on Monday at break when I went to see Thomas and Doreen, she was dead.’ Thomas followed soon afterwards.

Though having Gwyneth around was a comfort and deepened the lifelong bond between the two, being the third Pugh girl to pass through Dr Williams’ had its drawbacks. ‘I was always compared with my older sisters and found wanting,’ Bronwen remembers. ‘We were all three head girls. I was made to feel that I was made head girl simply because my sisters had been before me. My father came to give away the prizes when I was head girl and I remember him saying, “All my three daughters have been head girl here. Some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them.” That last one is the category I came into and I felt put down again. My sisters were better at everything.’

Being seen as part of a package, not as an individual, was part of the reason that Bronwen – or ‘Pug’ as she was known to her form-mates – came to feel trapped within the walls of Dr Williams’. She could never wait to get away from its confines. Her letters suddenly became upbeat and almost frenzied as the end of term approached and were full of references to the landmarks in the build-up to departure – One Glove Sunday, Cock-Hat Sunday, Kick-Pew Sunday. When the weekly countdown was almost complete, it turned into a daily task of crossing off days by means of the name Jack Robinson. It worked like an Advent Calendar. On each of the final twelve days, he lost one letter.

Another source of unhappiness was finding herself in a form of much older girls. In July 1942 the head wrote to the Pughs to suggest that Bronwen be kept down a year. ‘I cannot put it down entirely to her work which reaches a fair average, but she is the youngest in the form and in many ways is much more immature than the others … She is very childish still in her outlook and frequently in her behaviour.’ The transfer went ahead, but even then she was still a year younger than most of her classmates. In retrospect, Bronwen believes there was more to the head’s verdict than academic concerns. ‘I don’t think my temperament fitted in at the school. Yes, there was certainly immaturity. The others were all older. But I think what she was also getting at was that I had this sense of enjoyment and fun – still have it – this ageless enjoyment that people can find very disconcerting.’

Staying down a year did, however, bring about an immediate improvement in her academic performance, though still teachers felt that she was falling short of full effort and dedication. ‘An able pupil who can do really well when she wants to,’ her English mistress commented in the summer of 1943. ‘Bronwen can do very good work but at times is too easily distracted,’ echoed her arithmetic teacher in autumn of the same year. ‘Must try to be tidier and less noisy,’ the head summed up in autumn 1944. Towards the end of her career at Dr Williams’, however, her marks and the accompanying appraisals changed. ‘She is acquiring dignity and a sense of responsibility,’ the head concluded at the end of 1945.

Reading Bronwen’s letters home, all carefully dated and preserved by her father, it is hard to imagine that she was anything but uproariously happy at Dr Williams’. They are full of stiff upper Up, sporting triumphs (she was in every team and captain of hockey), gusto and good cheer. ‘We were all trained not to complain,’ she says now. ‘Remember I was a Truby King baby. I was trained from the start to be self-contained and self-controlled. If you complained you were told to go away and not bother people. There was no giving up and so you repressed it and cried yourself to sleep.’ Subsequent research on the effects of Frederic Truby King’s methods bean out her memory. In a paper in the British Journal of Psychotherapy Gertrud Mander identifies ‘a grin and bear it ethos’, ‘a deep sense of being unacceptable and unlovable’ and even ‘an on-going depressive undercurrent’ as the hallmarks of a Truby King baby. By encouraging mothers to subject their children to a rigid regime and concentrating in a Victorian way on physical well-being, Mander writes, Truby King’s ‘own fateful contribution to infant care’ was erroneously to assume that in a healthy body mental and emotional equilibrium would naturally follow.