My grandmother's grandfather died in 1913, survived by his wife, Ann, and five children: four sons and a daughter, Margaret. The sons all married and left home; but Margaret, who was 35 when her father died, remained as her mother's companion. At some point the two women moved a few miles across North London from their house in Canonbury to Belsize Park, where they lived together until Ann died in 1936, when Margaret was 58. After her mother's death she had some kind of breakdown and her brothers arranged for her to move into a nursing home in Tetbury in the Cotswolds, a hundred miles and several worlds away from the city she had lived in all her life.

LRB 9 July 2009 | PDF Download