'Now stop it, Clare,' my father would say. 'If you're not careful you'll stunt the boy's growth.'
'Go on,' she said. 'Don't be frightened of it. Drink it.'
I always did everything my mother told me.
'That's enough,' my father said. 'He only has to know what it tastes like.'
'Please don't interfere, Boris. This is very important.'
My mother had a theory that nothing in the world should be kept secret from a child. Show him everything. Make him experience it.
'I'm not going to have any boy of mine going around whispering dirty secrets with other children and having to guess about this thing and that simply because no one will tell him.'
Tell him everything. Make him listen.
'Come over here, George, and I'll tell you what there is to know about God.'
She never read stories to me at night before I went to bed, she just 'told' me things instead. And every evening it was something different.
'Come over here, George, because now I'm going to tell you about Mohammed.'
She would be sitting on the sofa in her black trousers with her legs crossed and her feet tucked up underneath her, and she'd beckon to me in a queer languorous manner with the hand that held the long black cigarette-holder, and the bangles would start jingling all the way up her arm.
'If you must have a religion I suppose Mohammedanism is as good as any of them. It's all based on keeping healthy. You have lots of wives, and you mustn't ever smoke or drink.'
'Why mustn't you smoke or drink, Mummy?'
'Because if you've got lots of wives you have to keep healthy and virile.'
'What is virile?'
'I'll go into that tomorrow, my pet. Let's deal with one subject at a time. Another thing about the Mohammedan is that he never never gets constipated.'
'Now, Clare,' my father would say, looking up from his book. 'Stick to the facts.'
'My dear Boris, you don't know anything about it. Now if only you would try bending forward and touching the ground with your forehead morning, noon, and night every day, facing Mecca, you might have a bit less trouble in that direction yourself.'
I used to love listening to her, even though I could only understand about half of what she was saying. She really was telling me secrets, and there wasn't anything more exciting than that.
'Come over here, George, and I'll tell you precisely how your father makes his money.'
'Now, Clare, that's quite enough.'
'Nonsense, darling. Why make a secret out of it with the child? He'll only imagine something much much worse.'
I was exactly ten years old when she started giving me detailed lectures on the subject of sex. This was the biggest secret of them all, and therefore the most enthralling.
'Come over here, George, because now I'm going to tell you how you came into this world, right from the very beginning.'
I saw my father glance up quietly, and open his mouth wide the way he did when he was going to say something vital, but my mother was already fixing him with those brilliant shining eyes of hers, and he went slowly back to his book without uttering a sound.
'Your poor father is embarrassed,' she said, and she gave me her private smile, the one that she gave nobody else, only to me - the one-sided smile where just one corner of her mouth lifted slowly upward until it made a lovely long wrinkle that stretched right up to the eye itself, and became a sort of wink-smile instead.
'Embarrassment, my pet, is the one thing that I want you never to feel. And don't think for a moment that your father is embarrassed only because of you.'
My father started wriggling about in his chair.
'My God, he's even embarrassed about things like that when he's alone with me, his own wife.'