Lynn Barber comes from the ''lower, unremembered, orders on both sides''. There is no ancestral home or village – just parents who were determined that she should work hard and make something of herself. Well, they were – until Simon proposed and it was explained to her that Oxford didn't really matter, that being married to a good man would be more important. Simon was much older – older in fact than he would admit to – and he picked Lynn up (quite literally) at a bus stop when she was just sixteen. Surprisingly her parents were unworried by this and threw them together, despite the fact that Simon, who was in the property business, had some strange friends. In the nineteen fifties it wasn't every sixteen year old girl who had a passing acquaintance with the evil slum landlord, Peter Rachman.