Ever since I discovered that the artist Barbara Hepworth sent her eldest son to boarding school when he was 5, I have been fascinated by the dynamics of growing up in the shadow of a creative parent. I had assumed that it would be mostly advantageous, that Hepworth engaged in a seamless interchange between work and family life, popping from her studio at the end of the garden to hang out with her children, and streams of interesting and unconventional guests holding court in a cosy but chaotic kitchen.

The truth was less romantic: Hepworth got a nurse to look after her son, Paul Skeaping, almost as soon as he was born. The artist’s single-minded approach reaped professional rewards but her son paid a heavy price.

I began to wonder whether his experience was typical. As a writer and mother of three, I could understand in some small way the conflict between the desire to work and domestic imperatives: how did it play out in other households? So I embarked on a six-month journey to interview different generations from creative families about their domestic lives.

I wanted to find out whether their parents’ successes were a boon or a burden for children and how it impacted on their own choice of careers. All the interviews for the subsequent radio series took place around kitchen tables, sometimes with three generations of the same family.

It was with some trepidation that I knocked on the door of Lady Tessa Montgomery’s flat in South Kensington in July last year to talk to her about what it was like growing up as the daughter of the writer Daphne du Maurier. I knew that du Maurier was a notoriously distant mother. In fact, Montgomery, a wonderfully dignified and softly spoken 76-year-old, described her mother without any hint of resentment… Continue Reading