In the Observer:

13 November 1960

I wish w I could remember in what year, ye when my brother Osbert and an I arrived at Montegufoni on o a visit to our parents. We were w greeted by my father with w the news that “a most extraordinary ex man came over to luncheon here – a man with red hair. I think he is a writer; he said his name is Lawrence. He brought his wife. She jumped on all the beds after luncheon – to see if the mattresses were soft.” (My father had a superb collection of painted 17th-century beds.)

A few days after we received this information, Mr and Mrs Lawrence invited us to tea.

We drove through the Tuscan countryside to their tall, pink house that looked as if it were perched upon a hen’s legs.

Lawrence had rather a matted, dank appearance. He looked as if he had just returned from spending an uncomfortable night in a very dark cave – hiding, perhaps, in the darkness, from something which, at the same time, he, on his side, was hunting.

His hair, which had been very red, was now dimmed by illness, as though dust, or ash, had quenched that flame. It hung down, at moments, into his bright and eager eyes, hindering him from seeing anything.

Though courteous and amiable, he was determined to impress upon us that he was a son of soil (that was the great romance, apart from his marriage with Mrs Lawrence, in his life), and he seemed trying to make us uncomfortable by references to the contrast between his childhood and ours. But this was not our fault, and we refused to be discomfited.…

Mrs Lawrence, a woman with curiously attractive, slanting, bright blue eyes, explained the natives of Bloomsbury to me – sometimes correctly – and told me how she had been obliged to protect Lawrence from the snares they laid for him.

This couple can never have known a dull moment, since everyone who met them fell in love either with her or with Lawrence.…The utmost ingenuity had to be exercised in order to circumvent their plots. They had mercy on neither age nor sex. Anything might happen at any moment, and in any place, and although it never did happen, that did not spoil the fun.