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The little house in Richmond Park ceased to be my home on the death of my grandmother soon after the end of the First World War. I had spent most of my childhood and early youth there up to the dangerous age of puberty, when skies cloud over and spectres begin to crowd around.
It was a 'grace and favour' house, for Queen Victoria had bestowed it upon my great-grandfather, Richard Owen, the great anatomist, for occupation during his lifetime.
One of the intellectual giants of the Victorian age, he had endeared himself to the Queen by ranging himself on the side of the angels in the controversy with the odious Mr Darwin which shook society to its foundations in the middle of the last century. I have always thought that this must have been rather a cynical attitude for this great man to have taken up because, as a zoologist and anatomist of the first rank, he must have realised that Darwin and his champion, Thomas Henry Huxley, were right.
However, he was a lecturer to the royal family and it was his job to lecture on not too natural history to rows of young princes and princesses. When he died at a great age a the end of the century his daughter-in-law, the widow of his only son, he was allowed by Edward the Seventh, who had often visited the old Professor when he was bed-ridden, to continue to live in the house in the park. His daughter-in-law was my grandmother, an indomitable, capricious old lady, who from time to time had her three daughters and their families to live with her by turns.
Somehow it seemed to come about that the turns of the eldest daughter and her husband, my parents, with their children, were longer than those of the others so that the little house and its lovely garden, full of great trees, seemed to me like home. I shall certainly never know another like it and its peace and tranquillity and the misty, wide view across the park are indelibly stamped on my memory.
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