I was in love, of course, but the marriage, in 1964, was also a relief to me because it marked a symbolic severance from the culture of the Blue Plaque House. This is a post hoc attribution: I would not (could not) have put it like that at the time. But turning my back on the house and all it represented was no simple feat, because of my admiration for my father’s writings and his socialist values, and because of the pull the legend of our happy family life exerted on my loyalties. I became a married woman before I finished my first degree; the fact that marriage required both the permission of my parents and that of Somerville College, Oxford, seemed to me then merely amusing, rather than any kind of serious comment on women’s status. I was pleased then to use the excuse of marriage for a name-change. Not so long before, I had consulted Brian Abel-Smith about finding a solicitor to change my name using less traditional means, but I didn’t quite have the bottle to go through with it. Struggling similarly at a similar age, Louise Kehoe, daughter of the modernist architect and duplicitous father Berthold Lubetkin, also resorted to the feminine manoeuvre of an early marriage. If I thought marriage or a change of name would enable me to become my own person, I was, of course, wrong. Becoming one’s own person is the project of a lifetime. Yet it’s also a spurious ideal: the creation of a culture unwarrantably fixed on this notion that everyone’s task must ultimately be to find their own separate personhood. We are never separate from the lives that produced us; we carry our childhoods and our genealogy within us always. The only thing that changes is our relationship to these, the stories we tell ourselves and others, our ‘reconstructive endeavours’.

However confused I was about the matter of identity, I was clear about my immediate domestic future: I wanted to create a different kind of family from the one I had known until then. I wanted to be enmeshed in warmth, in close physical affection, in clutter and friendly argument. I wanted to live in an untidy house, not a tidy one.