It is common knowledge that the Mexicans go and picnic on the graves of their ancestors, taking food for the dear dead. Perhaps that was what I couldn’t supply imaginatively as I stood in the court where allegedly a game had been played with human heads, or when I looked into the stone face of the rain god Chac Mool at the summit of one of the pyramids. It was a relief to see that his uncomfortable pose and lugubrious features looked exactly like James Fergusson, who would have made an improbable Mayan.

In between visits in the dawn before the great heat rolled over these ancient sites, we drove with our guide Mr Cervantes, prodigiously belted around his generous tum, and visited churches whose inner gold was like being swallowed by the burning sun itself, though they were lit low and only brushed by little candles.

In Oaxaca, I was briefly kidnapped. Quentin found me in the police station. There had been a misunderstanding and a perfectly genial crowd of kidnappers had thought I was Jimmy Connors’s new wife, who was apparently a Playmate of the Year in Playboy magazine.

In the way of new couples in a new place, we found ‘our’ restaurant and ‘our’ waiter. We fell for an elderly waiter whose deep melancholic physiognomy was so paintable, so Spanish, that he seemed to have walked straight from the frame of a painting by Velázquez. Having been born in Spain, on the feast of Santiago, Quentin has an affinity with Spaniards, though a Mexican Spaniard is another kind of Spaniard. I feel a strong attraction to that Spanish Greek, El Greco, born in Candia.

It was at the metal table tended by this beautiful waiter, wrapped in his pure white apron, that I learned that of all spirituous liquors, tequila is to me the most dangerous and powerful. I saw black visions. The iguanas didn’t help, purposeful and with empty eyes. They look repulsively knowledgeable, hardenedly social.

Quentin had planned in detail a long honeymoon involving deeper penetration of the jungle — to see Mayan ruins — than we eventually made. We spent some time self-catering in Cancún, an outpost of one kind of American civilisation. When I say self-catering, I mean that we got shy of the communal dining room of the resort we found ourselves in. Somehow it was common knowledge that we were newlyweds and the combination of being serenaded and of not giggling at the menu (‘Pork Chops Deutsch’ got us every time) drove us to spend time in our little cabin on the beach. Since he had been to Mexico before, Quentin had developed a taste for Huevos Rancheros; since I was in love, I ate them too. The other thing we lived on was avocados. I never became quite used to the flat-footed arrival into our bedroom of a grumpy seven-foot-long iguana, who seemed to want to play. He did that thing that creatures in thumpingly hot countries do of staying very still indeed and then making a sudden movement that chills the blood. I think he was in love with Quentin too and wanted to drive us apart. He certainly saw it as his business to guard Quentin from any overtures from me. He was very dusty and I wondered whether he was polished at all underneath. His sides ticked. He stood, it seemed to me, for disappointment, aridity and a general sense of having missed the party. There was no reasoning with him.

In the end, for a Malcolm Lowry fan, it was the perfect way for a Mexican honeymoon to come to a halt. We ran out of money. Quentin, who is good at that sort of thing, made several phone calls. The iguana watched us. Perhaps he was even jealous of the telephone.

At last, after, it seemed, more than a dozen abortive telephone calls conducted in Spanish, Quentin got through to someone who said that they were the secretary to the British Consul. Naturally grave and courteous, Quentin enquired whether he might speak to the Consul.

It was the middle of the afternoon.

The reply came from the secretary, that no, Quentin might not speak to the Consul, since the Consul was taking his rest.

It was irresistible not to hope that the Consul was sleeping it off.

In the event, we flew home, happy in the almost certain knowledge that Oliver would be joining us at some point fairly soon. Over the next nine months I doubled in size. This is not a figure of speech. Quentin was gallant about having married someone of ten stone who very shortly became someone of eighteen.

After Oliver’s first Christmas in the hands of his doting but unpractised parents, help arrived in the octogenarian form of Nanny Ramsay. She was the real thing. Her best friend was also a nanny and had, like our nanny, been nanny to three generations of the same family. When they telephoned each other for a chat, they addressed one another as Nanny, as though it was their given name. I do not know Nanny Ramsay’s Christian name. She smoked one cigarette each evening, out of the window, one foot crossed over the other at the ankle and one hand on her narrow hip. The very old-fashioned sort of nannies used to come in two shapes, fat or thin. She was a thin nanny. She wore a white overall, a belt, a hairnet. Michael Foot was leader of the Labour Party at the time and Nanny said of him, ‘Poor Michael Foot, I can’t imagine who his nanny might have been. Look at his hair.’

Nanny was a Scot from Crieff and had retired aged seventy-five. She came out of retirement to do some babies, as favours. She liked to weigh the baby before and after each feed, in proper scales such as a grocer might use, with weights going right down to an eighth of an ounce. Nanny made me keep a notebook to see how Oliver was getting on. It was quite clear that he was thriving. In the scales, he looked much like a person who is always going to hang over the end of things.

There had been but one tricky moment in the haze of delight that surrounded the arrival of Oliver, which was when Quentin’s aunt Camilla visited just before the birth. I had stencilled the cornice of the baby’s room with mermaids and Aunt Mickey, as the family called her, was perfectly content with that. My instinct told me, though we never actually knew from a scan, that the baby would be a boy, and I had purchased what I thought of as a very sensible selection of blue clothes for his arrival, jumpers, jeans, a blanket.

Aunt Mickey instinctively took over the matter of babywear for an impending heir. She took me to the White House, now long gone, where she ordered quires of monogrammed poplin handkerchiefs for the small face to rest upon. Dozens of long white nightgowns with no more than the faintest touch of forget-me-not on the smocking, drifts of shawl made in the Shetland Isles, Egyptian cotton sheets with the discreetest of ‘W’s in the corner, were all were amassed for this most weighty of arrivals. Any other equipment we acquired at the also long-gone Simple Garments of Sloane Street, where it was simply impossible to buy anything synthetic or with animals on it, or anything at all that looked as though it had been confected after 1953. Quentin’s Aunt Philippa Chelsea sent silk bibs. She was the family beauty, lushly voiced, clever, small. She had worked on Jocelyn Stevens’s Queen magazine.

Thank goodness for Aunt Mickey. She had set me on the path of rectitude. And so it was that Oliver and then Clementine were dressed as the kind of children who wore tweed coats with velvet collars and strapped sandals and short pure cotton socks. It is only fair at this stage to say that Clementine complained about this from the age of twelve to the age of twenty-three. She would say, ‘Mummy made me wear smock-dresses and strappy sandals till I was twenty.’ For a long time another line of Clem’s has been that she doesn’t want daughters though this has, by a recent miracle, been lifted during my blindness. The last time we touched on the matter of how she would dress her female children, she said, ‘I’m keeping them in smock-dresses and Mary Janes until they’re thirty!’