Denise Lestrange Corbet - All that glitters

In 2008, I celebrated my twelfth birthday. It was a lovely occasion, apart from the fact that I looked and felt forty-eight.

I m a leap-year baby, you see; born on 29 February, 1960. The date, I like to think, was a harbinger of my life to come. Nothing was going to be easy not even birthdays.

My father, Donovan, was desperate for a son. What am I going to do with that? he asked my mother when he discovered the squalling infant she had just delivered was another girl.

Both my parents were born in India, to wealthy British families. My mother, Elsie Ethel Williams, was the youngest of five children in a Scottish family living in Allahabad, in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. She never met her own father, Arthur, who died aged 27 while having surgery for a brain tumour, while his wife, also named Elsie, was pregnant with my mother.

By the time the fatherless babe came into the world in 1928, the family was living with Arthurs sister, who was a senior administrator in the colonial education system. This lady, whose name was also, confusingly, Elsie (but known to all of us as Big Aunty) had deep connections to Indian politics and was wealthy in her own right, so the family had cooks, cleaners and servants. When the children turned five, they were packed up north to board at the Wynberg-Allen School in Mussoorie, a hill station at the foot of the Himalayas.

For my grandmother, the young widow Elsie, it was a comfortable life. Her husband Arthur had, on his deathbed, asked his best friend William Trow to look after the family, and William was true to his promise, becoming my grandmothers constant companion. Nobody was ever quite sure if they married, but Grandma and William stayed together until she died in 1979.

Poor William. He was honourable and loyal, and never wavered from the deathbed oath he had taken, but life with Gran must have been hell for him. She was cold and loveless, the most undemonstrative person I have ever met.

Ive often wondered why she was so awful. Certainly, the untimely death of her husband must have been traumatic for her, but the experience did not make her empathetic or soft. To put it mildly, she was a fucking bitch.

She and William adopted two children Mickey Trow, Williams nephew, and a sickly baby called Peter Smith but when her children came home from boarding school for holidays she displayed little interest, regarding her offspring as an interruption to her life.

Big Aunty was the real maternal figure in the household. Warm and expressive, she would welcome the clattering adolescents with enthusiasm, and they adored the high-society glamour of her life. Friends were always welcome to drop around, and thus it was that Arthur, my mothers brother, brought home a young man named Donovan LEstrange-Corbet to play tennis, one day in 1943. On seeing the very shy 15-year-old Elsie, Donovan was smitten. That, he told his friend Arthur, is the girl Im going to marry. Arthur laughed out loud.

Donovan had to wait a few years, however. When he met my mother he was only 14, and their world was about to be thrown into chaos.