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Diana Holman-Hunt’s childhood was spent between two vastly different households. Her maternal grandparents lived on a large country estate where she was expected to do chores, and read to her blind grandfather. Visitors provided diversion, as in a Jane Austen novel. She had a fond relationship with her grandmother’s maid Fowler and made friends with a local fisherman who lived in a hut on the beach.

Then for a while she’d go to stay with her father’s mother in London. That grandmother was the widow of Pre Raphaelite painter William Holman-Hunt. Eccentric isn’t quite the word to describe her. She lived with a servant in a house crowded with priceless artwork, surrounded by props from her late husband’s paintings, and a lot of hoarded junk. She was scornful about bodily comforts like fresh food and comfortable beds. Her aim in life was to keep William’s memory alive, and she took Diana to the Tate to see his paintings (commenting on other painter’s works - “Turner, that nasty little man!”). She quizzed Diana on her knowledge of all Holman Hunt family stories, like the time William boiled a horse’s bones in the yard so he could be sure of their anatomy.

Much of Diana’s childhood sounds pretty awful. Her father was off in Burma and wasn’t much of a dad when he returned; we never find out what happened to her mother, nor if Diana thinks of her. But she writes from a child’s point of view, accepting whatever the adults dish out and finding amusement in odd ways, so it doesn’t feel sad. It’s very entertaining and funny.

Apparently this book was a best seller in England. I enjoyed it so much I bought the biography she wrote of her grandfather and his wives and lovers, from 1969. The grandmother of this book was his second wife, his deceased wife’s sister, and their marriage was illegal at the time. ( )

This is an amazing book is a memoir by the grand-daughter of the Pre-Raphaelite painter, William Holman-Hunt, who died before she was born. The memoir begins on a birthday, one on which Diana could have been no older than five. Her mother dead, her father in India, Diana is living with her maternal grandparents, the Freemans. Grandfather Freeman was a successful barrister who has become blind and now sits at home. Grandmother Freeman, while supervising Diana's upbringing, is not emotionally engaged with her. Diana says of her "I could never describe her looks, the shape of her face or the colour of her eyes; but her expression seemed to cloud and clear like the sky. She demanded perfection. At the wave of her hand or the touch of a bell, some smiling person would appear and quietly remedy a fault; a dead rose in a vase, a smudge on the window, a weed in a flower bed, would provoke her to complain. She would protest at a confusion of plans or even a silence: ' What terrible muddles! How dull; my dear, can't you see, I want to be amused'. We must all, except Fowler, be neat and gay however we were feeling and our hands and tongues must never rest." Grandmother Freeman's affection is reserved for her son, who visits seldom, but when he does the household is rearranged for him. When Diana complains to her grandfather that she is ignored he explains with brutal honesty that she is simply not interesting enough.

Like many children of well-off Edwardian families, Diana seldom sees other children and has only formal exchanges with the adults of her family. She spends her days with the servants and with people she meets in the countryside around the house. She knows the village policeman, and is friends with the old fisherman who lives on the beach. The aforementioned Fowler is one of the servants. Her official role is unclear, but she is definitely top dog and in practical terms comes closest to holding a mother's place to Diana. Diana's relationships either side of the baize door are shown strongly on her birthday. Fowler wakes her with birthday wishes and a teddy bear which she and three other servants have ordered from Selfridges because they knew she would like one. Grandmother Freeman has quite forgotten that it is Diana's birthday and is dismissive of the toy bear. Grandfather Freeman has remembered her birthday and declares she is to be excused piano practice. Her grandparents give her a pearl necklace to grow into, her maternal aunt gives her a silver piano for her doll's house, and her father sends her the skin of a young leopard which he has shot. He also sends her an extraordinary birthday letter ending "I wish you many happy returns and I am your affectionate father. Postscript. It is time you knew that it is all rot about fairies and Father Christmas.” He has also instructed that she is to spend more time with her H-H grandmother, known as Grand.

Grand lives in London in a dark, filthy, house which she keeps as a shrine to Holman-Hunt's memory. Terrified of burglars, every night before going to bed she nails tripwires to the floor and hangs bells over the doors. She insists on the subjugation of the body, ‘Brother Ass’. Unspeakably bad and meagre food is prepared by Helen, the only servant, whose domain is a damp basement infested with cockroaches and black beetles. Fowler arranges for fresh food to be sent up from the country but Diana never gets to eat it. One feels her despairing rage as fresh eggs are put aside in favour of foul century eggs and a cake is given away to boy scouts. Most of the house is locked up and the few used rooms are dimly lit and badly heated. Diana is made to sleep on a sofa in Grand’s bedroom and to bathe in Grand’s used bathwater.

Grand won't let anyone forget Holman-Hunt. She stands Diana before his paintings in galleries loudly pointing out all the relations who were his models. She spends so long prostrate at his tomb in Westminster Abbey that Diana is terrified that they will be locked in for the night. She sends Diana barefoot to a children’s party dressed as the goddess Diana in a tunic which Grand has embroidered with her own hair. An inveterate name dropper, Grand is always telling stories about the past, coloured by her own prejudices. She has no sense of the ridiculous, even in H-H’s attempt to boil a horse in the garden. Diana repeats all Grand’s stories to visitors, who leave with surprising and somewhat unreliable information about the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

Diana’s father finally returns. Totally unfit to be a father, he takes the young girl to nightclubs where he drinks with the assorted female habituées. These women are Diana's only guides as she struggles towards adulthood. When on the recommendation of one of them Diana has teeth removed Grand deals with the unsightly result by having her wear a yashmak.

This extraordinary memoir is packed with remarkable incidents. Diana Holman-Hunt had a good ear for dialogue and there are some wonderful throwaway lines. She has somehow written a funny book about an appalling life, the kind of life against which Edith Fowler was protesting when she wrote The Young Pretenders, to which this makes the perfect pair.

A totally bewitching little book that makes my own childhood seem like heaven. Diana's headstrong character, irrepressible good humour and charming irreverence bubbles through this account of her early years spent in the charge of her two grandmothers, the disapproving, straitlaced Grandmother Freeman in a house on the edge of the Surrey marshes, and the batty Grand (Edith Waugh) in a dark London mansion that is more mausoleum than house. Diana's father Hilary, son of the pre-Raphaelite painter Holman Hunt, is 8000 miles away in India, and her mother an unknown entity, apart from the fact that she is called Norah and that Diana never saw her. Did she die, was there a scandal? I can't find any information about her, but she seems to be unmentionable. ( )

Diana Holman-Hunt – granddaughter of the eminent Pre-Raphaelite painter – spent her Edwardian childhood shuttling between two wildly contrasting households. My Grandmothers and I is her darkly funny memoir of that time. One of the households, in Kensington, belonged to Diana’s paternal grandmother, Holman-Hunt’s eccentric widow, known to Diana as ‘Grand’. The other, on the edge of the Sussex marshes, was the home of her mother’s parents, Grandmother and Grandfather Freeman. While the Freeman household ran on oiled wheels, with a full complement of servants to minister to Grandmother Freeman’s whims, parsimonious ‘Grand’, in her big gaunt house full of treasures and valuable paintings, relied entirely on the services of ‘my good Helen’, a taciturn figure who existed in the damp, beetle-infested basement from which she produced inedible meals of scrag end, Bovril and ancient eggs. While sweet-smelling, self-indulgent Grandmother Freeman lived for the present, ‘Grand’ lived entirely in the faded splendour of her past. The two mistrusted one another deeply and competed for Diana’s affection while being spectacularly blind to her needs.

Out of this essentially bleak scenario, in which she was passed like a parcel from one to the other and finally left in her teens to fend for herself, Diana has woven a small comic masterpiece of pitch-perfect dialogue and deadpan observation.