I have left till last the stately, all-wise person of my beloved language tutor, minder and de facto governess, Madame Galina, purportedly a dispossessed countess from the Volga region of Russia with claims to Romanov blood. How she ever arrived in our fractious household remains unclear to me, my best guess being that she was the cast-off mistress of a great-uncle on my mother’s side who, after fleeing Leningrad, as it then was, and making himself a second fortune as an art dealer, devoted his life to acquiring beautiful women.
