My great uncle was a painter. Class 1918, the youngest of three, he had blond hair and the looks – I am told – of an old Hollywood actor. Left-handed and extraordinarily talented, he had always been an artist at heart: the earliest drawing of his we have at home dates back to 1931, when he was a teenager, but with the hand and the visual cognition of someone twice his age. 

As you would expect from an artist in the ‘30s, great uncle Dino was a bit of a hot head, but in a charming, fully bohemian manner: he liked women and had a special way with them, disliked school and was prone to get himself into trouble. It was my grandfather, middle child and accustomed to military life, who’d usually fixed the mess for him: nevertheless, he always loved his younger sibling, whom he protected and supported until the war took him away from his family forever.