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you chose not to go up to Oxford; being a blue-stocking isn’t every woman’s dream of happiness. But since you’ve rejected an academic life you must choose some 55 other career to pursue while you fill in your time before getting married. After all, even Arabella had a job arranging flowers in a hotel! I know she wound up in a muddle with that Italian waiter, but –’
    ‘I don’t want to arrange flowers in a hotel.’
    ‘Well, perhaps if you were to take a nice cordon bleu cookery course at Winkfield –’
    ‘I don’t want to take a nice cordon bleu cookery course at Winkfield.’
    ‘You don’t want to do anything,’ said my father. ‘It’s an absolute waste of a first-class brain. Awful. Tragic. It makes me want to –’
    ‘Ranulph,’ said my mother, ‘don’t undo all my good work, there’s a pet. Venetia –’
    ‘I think I’d like to be a clergyman.’
    ‘Darling, do be serious!’
    ‘All right, all right, I’ll take a secretarial course! At least that’ll be better than arranging bloody flowers!’
    ‘I can’t stand it when women swear,’ said my father. ‘Kindly curb your language this instant.’
    ‘You may have spent a lot of your life declaring in the name of your liberal idealism that men and woman should be treated equally,’ I said, ‘but I’ve never met a man who was so reluctant to practise what he preached! If you really believed in sexual equality you’d sit back and let me say "bloody" just as often as you do!’
    ‘I give up,’ said my mother. ‘I’m off to the conservatory.’
    ‘And I’m off to the Athenaeum,’ said my father. ‘I simply daren’t stay here and risk a stroke any longer.’
    ‘How typical!’ I scoffed. ‘The champion of equality once again takes refuge in an all-male club!’
    ‘Bloody impertinence!’ roared my father.
    ‘Bloody hypocrite!’ I shouted back, and stormed out, slamming the door.
    If I had been living in the ‘sixties I might then have left home and shared a flat with cronies; I might have taken to drink or drugs (or both) and chased after pop singers, or I might have opened a boutique or become a feminist or floated off to Nepal to find a guru. But I was living in the ‘fifties, that last gasp of the era which had begun in those lost years before the war, and in those days nice young girls ‘just didn’t do that kind of thing’, as the characters in Hedda Gabler say. (Hedda Gabler was one of Aysgarth’s favourite plays; he adored that clever doomed sizzler of a heroine.) It was also a fact that in between the acrimonious rows my life at home was much too comfortable to abandon in a fit of pique. My parents, exercising a policy of benign neglect, were usually at pains to avoid breathing down my neck, ordering me about and preaching nauseous sermons about setting an example to the lower orders. I was waited on hand and foot, well fed and well housed. In short, I had sufficient incentives to postpone a great rebellion, and besides, like Hedda Gabler, I shied away from any idea of not conforming to convention. If I flounced around being a rebel I knew I would only earn the comment: ‘Poor old Venetia – pathetic as ever!’ and wind up even worse off than I already was.
    So after that row with my parents in 1957 I did not rush immediately upstairs to pack my bags. I gritted my teeth and faced what I saw as the cold hard facts of life: no longer could I sit around sipping gin, smoking cigarettes and soaking up the sexy reminiscences of St Augustine. The day of reckoning for my refusal to go up to Oxford was at hand, and just like any other (usually middle-class) girl who considered that the hobbies of flower-arranging and playing with food were far beneath her, I had to embark on a secretarial training.
    However as I reflected that night on my capitulation to parental bullying, I thought I could face my reorganised future without too much grief; a secretarial course could well be my passport to what I thought of as Real