Elizabeth Longford

The Pebbled Shore: the Memoirs of Elizabeth Longford

Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986.

"The Gardens", as we called that fee-paying playground for the children of fee-paid parents - now Queen Mary's Gardens, a public part of Regent's Park - was the almost daily pilgrimage of Nurse, nursemaid, pram, mailcart, baby, toddlers, John and me. Many of my earliest meditations took place either in the gardens or on the way there. It was while crossing the bridge over Regent's Park lake, clinging to one handlebar of the big green double pram, that a puzzling thought entered my head: suppose everything that's happening now - the walk, the bridge, the water, Nurse, John, Kitty, me, everyone - is all in a dream? How am I to know? I couldn't know, could I, unless I woke up? But if I went on dreaming...Years later when reading philosophy at Oxford I was glad to find my childhood thoughts had found a place in more magisterial minds

Literature rather than philosophy was to be the author's future path. An acclaimed biographer and historian, several of her children were to become writers; they include the biographer Antonia Fraser, the novelist Rachel Billington, the poet Judith Kazantzis and the historian Thomas Pakenham. As a child living in nearby Harley Street, where she was born in 1906, the park must have seemed an ideal playground: 'there was a lake in the Botanical Gardens that I sketched lusciously with Windsor and Newton pastels, smudging in the autumn tints and getting an effect with no effort. I also collected frogspawn from the shallows...to keep in a bowl in Harley Street.'

I loved wet days...If we were in the Gardens when it came on to rain, we were allowed to shelter in the vast humid conservatory among writhing tropical plants instead of playing eternal hide-and-seek in the shrubberies. If we were in Regent's Park we would dash for one of the sooty Victorian summerhouses. From here, with luck, we could see the very pillar-box in which, Nurse told us, the suffragettes had posted dynamite instead of letters