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As it was always known. A substantial late Victorian house (right) on a busy North London road. Occupied during the 2nd and 3rd decades of the 20th century by a family of 11 and a couple of servants,  as was the norm then. The father was an overbearing and materialistic building contractor who showed no affection towards his 9 children. (Birthdays were not celebrated.) The mother was weak and helpless, worn down with childbearing and her husband's bullying. The strife between the parents was echoed among their offspring: the boys fought, the girls squabbled. Most escaped as soon as they could. The sons went to war (some below recruitment age) and survived to become: something in the rag trade/a failed farmer/an antiquarian book dealer/a fairground hot dog seller; the daughters, apart from the eldest who worked all her life in an office and looked after her parents, married: one a home counties solicitor successful in civic life,  another a speculator who prospered in California and the youngest  an impecunious and unemployed Russian exile with whom she settled in Wales and had one child - myself.

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
My mother disagreed with this opening sentence of Anna Karenina: she maintained it should be the other way around.

An old photo of the house is here and some background on my maternal grandparents' ill-fated marriage is here.


(The shapely woman crossing the road has nothing to do with the story.)