She appears on my pages as an advanced woman who abstained from corsets, rolled her own cigarettes and called spectacularly for glasses of water at moments of drama at the Fabian Society. One of the significant characters in my biography of Bernard Shaw was Mrs Edith Bland. ‘The sex barrier down, this aberration only added a certain warmth to our friendship.’ I felt something of this warmth and humour when I eventually came to read about her cat with the gooseberry eyes. Out of curiosity, ‘I allowed him to seduce me,’ she added. The work of dealing with unpaid bills and unanswered letters was enlivened at times by what she called ‘lots of silly fun’.

‘I felt a frisson whenever he came into the building,’ she wrote. While working on a life of the artist Augustus John, I discovered that Kathleen Hale, the creator of Orlando the Marmalade Cat, had worked as his secretary in the early 1920s. Much later, after I began writing biographies, I came across several children’s writers I now admire. It was not until my mid-teens that I entered the exciting and adventurous worlds of Rider Haggard and Conan Doyle (not Sherlock Holmes but Brigadier Gerard was my comic hero). After this there is a gap in my memory, though I suspect that Enid Blyton’s prolific volumes filled much of that period. But it was the illustrations rather than the words in Beatrix Potter’s and Alison Uttley’s books that I remember most vividly. The first stories I can remember reading in my early childhood were, it seems, mainly about rabbits.

The borrowers novel