I spent almost a year there but very few things from this time stick in my mind. One is the way packages were instantly confiscated. Every month my parents would send a parcel of sweets from America (sweets were still in short supply all over post-war Europe, even in Switzerland). This was opened by the school's headmistress and its contents locked away in a cupboard. Once a week the cupboard would be opened and the sweets equally distributed in tiny portions among all the pupils. Needless to say, I found this very distressing. Another memory is being told the facts of life by a Russian girl called Ludmilla. She was known as a bit of a fantasist, so I didn't for a moment believe the disgusting proceedings she described to me. Still, it must have made an impact, otherwise why do I remember the occasion so clearly? I also recall being overwhelmed by the power of Schiller's poetic drama Don Carlos, brilliantly read aloud by the literature teacher. And I certainly haven't forgotten how, when my parents finally came back from their travels, I wasn't allowed to see them because they arrived at the school after bed-time. Although I could hear them, I had to wait till the next day. 

Meanwhile, my father had been offered an important and very suitable job. The United Restitution Organisation (URO), an Anglo-American legal aid society to assist and compensate the victims of Nazi persecution, was set up in 1948, initially as a five-year project. But in the course of the next decade it grew into a worldwide enterprise, with offices in 19 countries and 1,000 staff. Over the years, it assisted and recompensed more than 200,000 people, mainly Jews but also Gypsies and others. My father, who became its director general in 1955, ended up working for the URO for 40 years, until the age of 91. "There are literally hundreds of thousands of people who may never have heard the name of Kurt May," said his obituary in the Independent, "but who are heavily in his debt. He conducted his work with a passion for justice, an unshakable belief in the right to demand the redress for wrongs and always maintained the greatest degree of dignity in the pursuit of this cause."

There was, however, a downside to this job: the URO's central offices were in Frankfurt and, needless to say, the last thing my parents had intended was to return to Germany. They reluctantly agreed, partly because of what they thought was the temporary nature of the job, and partly because they would live there among Americans — as part of the post-war American occupation of south-western Germany.

What they couldn't accept, though, was that I should be brought up and educated in Germany. My mother had already visited England to search for a suitable boarding school for me. At that time, the kind of girls' schools she looked at — Roedean and Cheltenham Ladies College — did not accept pupils who spoke no English. So she opted for Dartington Hall, the co-educational, experimental school in south Devon based on the "progressive" ideas of the American philosopher John Dewey.

My mother was not a great believer in the unstructured approach to education or in the laissez-faire attitude to learning that were Dartington's guiding principles. But she liked the school's teachers, and its setting — as well she might. The teachers were for the most part idealistic and interesting individuals some of whom had, for one reason or another, opted out of conventional society. Quite a number were refugees from Nazi Europe or Franco's Spain. The setting was the beautiful 1,000-acre estate, with its grand medieval Hall, which had been bought in 1925 by a philanthropic couple — the Elmhirsts, a Yorkshireman and an American heiress. One of their objectives was to build a school in which children would be free from the constraints and restrictions of the educational system that prevailed at the time.