"I never met anyone I would like to have married and had children I miss not having grandchildren now. We went out to the West Indies as guests of the governor, and later travelled from there up to Canada before returning home. Though she insists that she was too old to be a flapper, she does remember doing the Charleston at Saint Moritz. "It was very difficult and I wasn't very good, but we did it with gusto. People talked about the Black Bottom, but I never saw anyone do it. Nor was I trained for anything." Towards the end of the First World War she worked in a convalescent hospital but after that "I just played golf - gofe, it was pronounced in those days - and tennis and led a lady's life.

We did a tremendous amount of voluntary work."At the age of 20 she was sent to live with a family in Paris, then went on to Cannes for three years. "I was secretary of the British Lawn Tennis Club there, but after three years we came off the gold standard and people stopped going to the Riviera for the winter, so I came back to England."In the years that followed she travelled abroad, often with her parents. In Russia, the 1917 revolution toppled the tsar and brought Lenin to power, but the schoolgirl Jinkie recalled only Rasputin - "He was very intriguing, a very mysterious man with an extraordinary appearance."When she left school, she did not get a job. "In those days, no matter whether you had money or not - and we weren't well-off, just my father's army pension, and my mother had a little personal income - if you were a certain class you didn't work It wasn't proper. There was rationing in the second but no one was really hungry At the school, the head always had her meals on her own They were served by a butler.

One day half-a-dozen of us swooped on him as he was carrying the bread in to her, and stole it She was very upset to think we were that hungry. We were, but it was a bit of a lark, too."The events of the world impinged only tangentially. She was there for three years until, on 13 June 1917, Zeppelins dropped 118 high-explosive bombs on London. "I remember going down to the cellars when the Zeppelins appeared It was frightening It brought the war home. It was the first time London had been bombed, though when we went to look at the damage it was nothing compared to that caused by the air raids in the Second World War."We were hungrier in the first war than in the second, though. Short for high-jinks and all that."When the First World War broke out, she was sent to boarding school at Totteridge, just outside London. "I can't say I was very fond of any of them." From the age of four until she was eight she had a governess "We were always moving about.