MY EARLIEST MEMORY OF THE IDEA OF PAINTING was around the age of two or three, standing on the lavatory seat watching the bombs exploding over the Firth of Forth in Scotland. My father was in the Royal Navy. As was proper then, there was a fine white starched lavatory cloth, also I knew where my mother kept her pastels which...

I WRITE ABOUT MY PROGENITORS AS THEY are an important factor in the painter I became. My paternal grandmother Annie Taylor was Virginian. Her family house was built in Fredricksburg Virginia in 1722, though the family had settled before that. They fared badly in the civil war and Annie needed to marry money. She married Horace Bayliss, whose family business Bayliss, Jones and Bayliss was an iron founding and innovation firm in the North of England. My grandfather’s uncle was the famous Victorian watercolourist Sir Wyke Bayliss. He painted the interiors of cathedrals almost exclusively. When I discovered his work I was amazed to find the structures of his compositions were so similar to my own.

I FINISHED, OR SO I THOUGHT, my formal education around my seventeenth birthday. A year had to be filled, so through the nuns an au pair job was arranged with a family in Sicily. I was to improve the English of twin girls aged sixteen and their ten-year-old sister and also generally make myself useful. Senora Proto was well-upholstered and elegant, her husband shorter, moustached, kind and a business man. Their main house was a seventeenth century palazzo in the small port town of Milazzo. A house of much beauty but few luxuries other than an excellent cook.

AFTER MY RETURN FROM AMERICA I spent the summer in Ireland, not eating and being and feeling completely useless. My parents were money worried and distracted by the baby. Corries, our home, had been sold to the American family who had originally built it and we were living in another large old house belonging to family friends, so the usual question cropped up "What to do with Philippa?" The answer, more cousins, this time in Vienna.

THE BYAM SHAW SCHOOL OF ART was situated in a small road off Kensington Church Street at the Notting Hill end. The building was the classic Victorian Studio, plaster casts and still life on the ground floor, and the life painting and drawing studio upstairs. The life room was heated by the classic anthracite stove original to the building, using photo projection it could have well served for the set of La Boheme, or for that matter Trilby.

THE HOUSEHOLD OF 7B CARLTON HILL, my new home was made up of Trix Craig, once married to Maurice, Catherine aged thirteen, dark haired with an adult air of control which only an adolescent can master, Michael aged about eight, a quiet and dreamy serious boy and Meggie, a very gentle black Welsh Collie.

London in the nineteen sixties was a most exciting time to be a student, especially an art student though when you are young you take things for granted and need the later mirror of hindsight to fully appreciate what you have had.

I had remade contact with my cousin Victor Coates. If Victor had business in London he stayed at the Ritz and occasionally treated me to lunch there. I was usually too overawed to be hungry. I also spent part of several Easter breaks at his flat in Paris. Alice his Alsatian housekeeper - smallish, roundish and grey - always greeted me on arrival with an omelette and a half bottle of Champagne. David the dachshund also greeted me enthusiastically. Dog memory for walks under the chestnut trees of Avenue Georges Mandel.