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books and used her weekly pocket money to buy children’s newspapers.
    At six years of age Eve paid her first visit to her mother’s family home at Bisterne. 15 Many years later she could remember vivid details of this visit and recorded them in case anybody might be interested in the ‘trivial, day-to-day details of life in a more leisurely and more gracious age’. She travelled to Bisterne with her mother and two aunts in her grandmother’s new Austin, driven by the chauffeur Davis who, much to her surprise kept a potato on the seat beside him. Cars had no windscreen wipers in those days and when it rained, he cut off a piece of potato and rubbed it onto the windscreen. ‘This seemed to make the rain run off more easily.’
    They drove through farmland and open forest until finally at the end of a long curving driveway, they arrived at the grey two-storeyed house. The manor house lay in the middle of a park on the edge of the New Forest. Wild daffodils grew under cedar trees beside formal flowerbeds and tennis courts. There was a story that only white rabbits, as in Alice in Wonderland , were allowed to crop the green lawns; brown or multicoloured rabbits were shot. Mr Purtain, the gardener, spent most days tending the lawn with a broad mower pulled by Mole, the pony, who wore leather boots over his hooves to protect the grass.
    The house itself had been remodelled and restored over the centuries, an odd mix of grand and domestic styles. It was built over various levels and Eve found its ‘geography’ complicated. At the front, two stone stairways passed under triple-arched doorways emblazoned with a coat of arms. Two stone creatures, the Bisterne dragons, sat atop each entrance, guarding the doors but in a domesticated, indolent fashion. Eve thought they looked more like dogs. She and her mother were welcomed by the housekeeper who curtsied and bustled around in an ankle-length dress and apron. Spicer, the butler, opened the door in tails and the footman in plum-coloured livery resplendent with the Mills family crest, showed her mother and two maiden aunts to their rooms. Years later Eve remembered:
    Spicer escorted me back into the stone-flagged hall, down the stone steps, past the study and through the door … into the kitchen regions; down a long, stone-flagged, rather dark passage, past doors leading to the kitchen, pantry, scullery, butler’s pantry (where the footman spent hours polishing silver and glasses—wearing woven cotton gloves so as not to leave smeary finger marks—and sharpening the table knives on an emery board) and so on—right at the end was the House keeper’s Room, where I was entertained to tea by Mrs Wakenell (nobody would have presumed to call her by her Christian name: Harriet), a lady of uncertain age, in an ankle-length, close-fitting black dress.. I did not think it unusual that I should be sent off with the housekeeper. Most of my life I had spent in the nursery with my nurse and only briefly been ‘in company’ with grown-ups and visitors.
    To the family’s surprise, her parents’ marriage was not over and when Eve was eleven they were reconciled. The family travelled in Belgium, France and Cyprus, visiting aunts and cousins, the extended Dray family. Summers meant dress-up parties and days of swimming or archery. Finally Eve was with young people her own age and revelled in it.
    In 1926, aged twelve, Eve made her first trip to Cyprus, travelling by train to Marseille and continuing by sea to the port of Limassol on the south coast and on to Kyrenia, where the Dray family lived. North from Nicosia, the road travels through a narrow pass in the Kyrenia Range, guarded by the castle of St Hilarion. Against a cloudless blue sky the castle tumbles down the mountain spurs and ridges. Carobs with green fleshy leaves emerge from the rocks and in small flat areas the ancient twisted trunks of olives cling. The castle’s