In our family it was my sister who was early recognised as “the clever one”. Her headmistress at Brighton urged that she should go to Girton. My father was upset and said:”We can’t have Madge turned into a bluestocking. We’d better send her to Paris to be finished” . So my sister went to Paris, to her own complete satisfaction since she had no wish whatever to go to Girton. She certainly had the brains of the family. She was witty, very entertaining, quick of *repartee and successful in everything she attempted.

My brother, a year younger than her, had enormous personal charm, a liking for literature, but was otherwise intellectually backward. I think both my father and my mother realised that he was going to be the “difficult” one. He had great love of practical engineering. My father had hoped that he would go into banking but realised that he did not have the capacity to succeed. So he took up engineering - but there again he could not succeed, as mathematics let him down.

I myself was always recognised as the slow one of the family. The reactions of my mother and my sister were unusually quick - I could never keep up. I was, too, very inarticulate. It was always difficult for me to assemble into words what I wanted to say. "Agatha's always so terribly slow" was always the cry. It was quite true and I knew it and accepted it. It did not worry or distress me. I was resigned to being always "the slow one". It was not until I was twenty that I realised that my home standard had been unusually high and that actually I was quite as quick or quicker than the average. Inarticulate I shall always be. It is probably one of the causes that have made me a writer.