I took the train to Italy, of course. I was seventeen; it would be twenty years before I boarded my first plane, rushing to my mother’s deathbed in Tel Aviv though I knew mine wasn’t the hand she longed to hold.

I should be clear that I’m not the one you want either. You shouldn’t get your hopes up. We’ll come to that. I was meant to be having a year out, to grow up, because I’d been a year ahead of my age all through school. We’d all sat round the table after lunch one day the previous summer, even Dad though it was harvest time, to discuss my future, and Maman had said that however good my marks, even if I were to be offered a place I was too immature to go straight to Oxford.

Edith has seen nothing of the world, she’d said, lighting a cigarette which made Gran wince and open the window. She may be able to pass exams and I’m sure she will talk well about books in an interview but her Italian is that of a schoolgirl and even her French could be better, she has been almost nowhere and seen almost nothing, Oxford would be wasted on her.

It is a ridiculous plan. I will write to my friends and put together un petit tour, she can go to Teresa in Florence and then perhaps un stage at Marcel’s bookshop. An English country childhood is all very well but one does not send one’s daughter to Oxford for her to marry a farmer and live on a farm, n’est-ce pas?

I had glanced at Dad, the farmer whose wife Maman in fact was though she could hardly be said to live on the farm, but he had nodded and smiled through worse than that over the years and he said yes, Rachel, I dare say you’re right, let’s see.

Do you want to go travelling, pet, he asked me later when I was helping with the milking, would you like to stay with your mother’s friends, and I said yes, I think so, yes, I would, because although of course I disliked being called immature and also I could think of many things I had seen and understood on the farm that I would not have seen and understood elsewhere, I certainly had an appetite for more, for tree-lined city squares and great museums, for parties and lectures, for everywhere and everything.

And then months later, as my exams began, Maman had written to me from the artists’ commune in France where she was spending the spring, to say that instead of going to Teresa in Florence I was to go to my sister, who would be staying in a villa in another part of Italy and would need a companion while she had a baby.

Maman wrote, take the first turn up the hill and the gate is on your right. Here it was, a large double gate, fancy wrought iron, behind which a gravel drive lined with glossy-leaved pink-flowering bushes curved up daisied grass.

“Bloody hell, Lydie”, I said. Cypress trees towered over the lawns and I couldn’t see the house. The villa.

I took a deep breath and tried to turn the handle of the gate. Maybe it was just stiff. Maybe I should lift not turn. But the big keyhole was plain, oiled, in use.

What if it was the wrong house after all, what would they think, some travel-stained foreigner trying to get in? (Always getting, you English, in and out, up and off.)

I walked up the road a bit, to see if there was another house, if I could have made a mistake, but there wasn’t, not that I could see. After the end of the pink wall there was farmland, cows, and then the mountainside, only one villa to the right of the first road after the end of the village.

I tried the gate again, hurt my finger. Trust sodding Lydie to immure herself like Sleeping Beauty. What was I supposed to do, mount my charger and hack through a century’s growth of thorns?

No mobile phones, of course, in those days; if I’d had a telephone number for the villa, I could perhaps have returned to the village and negotiated the use of the panificio’s telephone, but I didn’t.

Nor, I reflected, did I have anything like enough money for a hotel, let alone a ticket back to England, or even to the South of France where I had a postal address for my mother’s hosts but no telephone number.

I should have to sleep in an olive grove, hitchhike my way back to Derbyshire, starve to death like Jane Eyre on the moor except that I would be surrounded after all by ripe oranges and figs and I still had my sandwich.

I sat down on the grass verge, which I later discovered to have been a mistake, insect bites in places you don’t want them, and ate half the sandwich and the last bit of the fruit cake from home, and then I gave thanks again to Daddy for the knapsack.