My gran was born in Builth Wells in Wales in 1880. As a child she was brought to London to watch Queen Victoria's jubilee procession. As a young adult she supported the suffragettes.

Her husband, Alessandro Clama, was born in Verona, northern Italy in 1872. They met in a railway carriage. He kissed her hand, and she thought: "How romantic, Englishmen don't do this sort of thing." I was told that Alessandro's sister was a nun, and that his cousin invented the dynamo. And amongst my gran's treasured possessions was an old Italian commemorative stamp with the cousin's face on it.

Alessandro was a mechanical engineer by training, and worked as an inventor. He loved motorcars, and most of his work involved them. My gran said he invented the hydraulic brake system, and she showed me his working drawings. She said he was not a business man and on the advice of his agent sold the hydraulic system for a relatively small sum to a company that made millions out of it. He was also developing an automatic gearbox.

They, Alessandro and my gran, lived in Italy for a while, and later moved into a house in Willesden, north London, where they lived with their two daughters (my mother and aunt Elvira), an English bulldog and a rabbit that used to run around the house. Alessandro was so attached to the bulldog that when it died he had it stuffed by a taxidermist. Thereafter it stood on the drawingroom carpet frozen in time a feast for the moths.

Alessandro died in 1934 at the age of 62, and my gran died 45 years later, in 1980, just after her 100th birthday. I was told Alessandro tripped over the rabbit and never completely recovered from the fall and died shortly after.

My gran's younger brother, Charles, was killed in the first world war, and her other brother, George, was run over in Canada in the early 1920s.

I was taken to visit Lil, my gran's elder sister, in 1951. She lived in a small old country cottage in Kent with her husband, Fred, and with her mother, my great grandmother, who was 95 years old.

Around the same time I visited Ruby, my gran's younger sister. She lived in a large victorian house in Nightingale Lane in Clapham, south London. She lived with her son, Douglas, and grandson, David, who was about my age. Douglas loved steam trains, and had built himself a large scale-model of a locomotive which he sat on and puffed his way along a track around the garden.