Feathering her nest

I came back to live in London in the late 1970s. I had been in Cambridge for two years before that, with [the scientist] Nick Humphrey, who was attached to the university, but I had found commuting to town with my two small children – Sasha and Orlando, then about 5 and 4 – quite impossible. I was playing Peter Pan on stage, driving six days a week to do two shows a day, and I was exhausted.

I was brought up in the hills of Ayrshire, in a house with views of the sea, but had moved to London at 16, when I came to study at Rada. On my return, I was incredibly lucky, as I nearly made a big mistake and bought a house in Fulham, but realised, at the last moment, that it wasn’t for me. Someone had told me about a house in Wandsworth, southwest London – 21 Blenkarne Road – with an incredible garden, so I went and had a look. I walked in and just said, “I want it.”

A few minutes’ walk from the common, the house was Victorian, in a crescent-shaped part of the road. It was on a corner plot that was shaped like a piece of pie. The garden really was amazing, with about a third of an acre – huge for London. This was divided into parterres, which I didn’t like, so I put a lot of it down to lawn. There was a wonderful wisteria, almost in the middle, over a trellis. It broke up the garden, but I didn’t want to cut it down, so I created a sort of tree out of it, training it up a great post, sunk into the ground. Nick would come up from Cambridge. We took up the crazy paving and created a big terrace. We also had an orchard, a vegetable garden and two glorious Victoria plum trees.

At the back was a beautiful but broken wrought-iron balcony with steps to the garden. Back then, we had three dogs and four cats. Boots, Orlando’s St Bernard, broke the steps one day, so an Italian artist friend of mine, Carlo, made a new balcony and steps with railings. I brought the garden furniture that had been with me in East Sussex, from when I was married [to the actor Michael Wells] – urns and a lovely human-size stone statue of a boy with a fox and grapes.

The house was pie-shaped, too. It was irregular, which is what really appealed to me. It had 3½ floors, really. From the entrance hall-way, there was a big sitting room, with two nice Victorian fireplaces. We would eat as a family in the kitchen/dining room, at a little table by the Aga, which I’d had put in, as I had been brought up with one. There were four bedrooms upstairs, and a study, where I had a wonderful desk that Nick gave me. John Maynard Keynes had given it to his wife, Lydia Lopokova, a ballerina with the Diaghilev ballet.

A friend, Angie, came to live with me there. She was a jack of all trades, a sister to me and a babushka to my children. In my job, you get a lot of letters, and she had written to me a few years before, saying that she liked my work and that she would like to work for me. She said she was good with accounts and roses. When I was pregnant with Sasha, I got out the note and contacted her, saying I was about to have a child, didn’t want a nanny, but needed some help – someone I could trust and leave children with. I liked her very much, and we gave it a try. We had great respect for each other’s privacy, and we knew we could learn a lot from each other. If I had to go to LA for a month, filming, she would bring the kids out. She died four years ago. It was an incredible loss. Everybody needs an Angie.

The house was filled with colour, and all the stuff I had collected over the years on my travels. I particularly loved a statue I had bought when I went to visit Orlando in Zimbabwe during his gap year. He took me out to a farm miles away from the nearest township, as he wanted to introduce me to a sculptor he’d met. I fell in love with a stone female head, but at first the sculptor wouldn’t part with it – it was of his favourite daughter, who had died. In the end, though, he said, “If you want it, you can have it.”

It was a sociable home. Elizabeth Taylor came for lunch, and to see the children – she is wonderful. And I’m pretty sure Warren Beatty came over. We would have lots of garden parties, to raise money for [Mordechai] Vanunu, for example.

I was entranced by the nightingales. The first time I heard one sing there, it was February, and I called Nick to tell him. He told me that the earliest time of year a nightingale had been recorded singing was March, in 1839. But then, on February 28 – I remember the date because it was a leap year – I heard it again.

I was there for more than 20 years. The children, of course, ended up going off to do their own thing, and I couldn’t cope with the garden on my own. When I moved out, on my last night there, I wandered around the empty house, clutching a cat, thinking, “I’m never going to hear the nightingales again.”

I was exhausted the night I moved to my new house in Clapham South. And there, at three in the morning, I heard a nightingale sing. I often hear them now in the garden.

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