The studio occupied a room that spread across the back of the ground floor of the house. Probably 35 foot or so long, some 20 foot wide and at least 12 foot high. In its heyday it was the sitting room of the house. It was a well proportioned room, with classic late Victorian or Early Edwardian features and a large open fireplace at one end of the room, with small nookery corner seats set on either side. Facing west southwest from the heights of Hampstead the room overlooked much of south and west London through half a dozen large tall sash windows. From the top floor of the house one could see well past Richmond and down into the Thames Valley beyond. Set on the leading edge of the Hampstead escarpment, near where the River Westbourne passes on its way towards Hyde Park, The Serpentine and Chelsea, the ground behind dropped away sharply, with the result that the house had more stories at the back than at the front. Below the studio were two more floors of utility and store rooms, while the front basement was the gigantic kitchen, set immediately underneath the ground floor dining room. The back garden wound down the hillside in a narrowing triangular pattern of small stepped terraces, not really planted so much as laid out decoratively for minimum maintenance, with gravel paths and terracotta urns full of cacti and succulents, hardy perennials and herbs.

For us children the basement area was something of an adventure playground; it was where we were sent to keep us occupied, away from the adults. It was here in a small spare room that my cousin first introduced me to the mysteries of the steam engine – a small methylated spirit fuelled model, with its own tiny burner and a shiny brass boiler full of water and driving a large flywheel modelled after the driving wheels of a Pacific Class loco. Like most Victorian steam engines the model had a good steam whistle on the exhaust stack, and a fully working governor which spun out centripetally to regulate the boiler pressure, displayed on a small dial on the wooden mount of the model. Our experiments to see just how much pressure we could get from the system, how fast we could get the flywheel to turn, often had noisy and unexpected consequences, until one day we decided to use a thimble of petrol stolen from the garage, instead of methylated spirits. The explosion rocked the house and led to an invasion of our private space by a collection of rather worried adults. None of us were hurt, no lasting damage done, but the steam engine was relegated to the locked store cupboard for several months until we had “learned our lesson!”

Evenings were always the magical time at that house: the sun going down in the west illuminated the rear wall turning the red brick to a warm golden shade, and flooded the studio with light. Even when there might be cloud over much of London, somehow or other there seemed to be a half hour or so when the sun would break through as it sank below the clouds. Once night set in the lights of the lower parts of London would begin to illuminate the pattern of streets below, allowing us to trace the mysterious paths of the traffic, but somehow the garden and the rear wall of the house would remain shrouded in an impenetrable darkness; until the studio lights were switched on.

Ranked around the walls and ceiling of the studio on wooden battens suspended on a clever system of pulleys and guy ropes was a phalanx of double fluorescent tubes which could be rotated and angled to illuminate whichever of the easels was then in use. Thus served, painting could continue through the night if need be.

The light would flood out from the massive windows into the garden below, starkly illuminating the architecture and creating monstrous shadows.

For some reason I can’t explain, I have this impossible fantastical vision of us children standing in darkness in the gardens below, staring up at the illuminated windows, as the two of them are fighting in the studio above, close to the windows, with the lights on, casting their huge angry wayang golek shadows onto the blinds, wrestling, dancing with each other almost formally, backwards and forwards across the length of the room accompanied only by the sounds of breaking furniture and clashing metal and smashing glass.

Although it never happened that way – we children were far too young to have been in the garden to see the conflict – it is somehow an appropriate vision, for my uncle had spent time in Bali and Java in the ’20s, and his first wife had been a Balinese dancer whom he brought back to Europe with him who infected and affected all of his physical behaviour – he moved like a dancer till the day he died.