In Jerusalem, we lived in a large flat above the shop. My father and his brother ran the business and my mother did the accounts. A succession of cook/housekeepers, usually Arab women (I had had an Arab wet-nurse — breast-feeding was not something my mother could countenance), would look after me in the daytime, though my mother would appear from time to time to ensure that her strict rules were being observed. During mealtimes, for example, I often had to hold books under my arms to make sure that my elbows weren't sticking out. If I didn't finish my spinach at lunchtime, it would be served up again for supper. The Arab ladies cooked European food.

Before I started school, I spent a great deal of time playing on my own or following the housekeeper around listening to her complaints. Two other children, sisters who were about the same age as me, lived in our building but I was not allowed to play with them. They were deemed unsuitable by my mother. She did not consider their Polish family to be sufficiently cultured or respectable. But I remember these two girls, whom I never properly met, more distinctly than many later friends. We used to call to each other, and throw things to one another, across our respective balconies. People often assume that only-children are spoilt — and at some level that may be true. But what chiefly impressed me about these sisters was that there were two of them. How lucky that seemed.

Not that my childhood in Jerusalem was unhappy. I recall frequent trips to the city's best ice-cream parlour, holidays at the seaside resort of Netanya (now a large town and latterly the site of several Palestinian suicide attacks, most notably the Passover massacre in 2002), whizzing around the shop on my tricycle, being cosseted by the shop assistants. One of these later married Victor Weisz, the brilliant cartoonist known as Vicky, who emigrated to England in 1935.

Best of all, I remember an annual excursion to pick flowers with my adored father. He would take the day off — presumably with the aim of putting in what is now called "quality time" with me (though at the time I felt that we were covertly conspiring to get away from my mother) — and we would walk hand-in-hand to the outskirts of Jerusalem. We would clamber across rocky hills looking for the long-stemmed wild cyclamen, pink, purple and white, which sprang up every year in the patches of dusty earth between the rocks. We were always alone on this stony high ground, with its panoramic view of the old city surrounded by olive groves. Even as a small child I could sense that there was something historic and mythical in this landscape, or so it seems to me now.

Apart from our housekeepers and the westernised ladies who shopped at our store, I didn't meet many Palestinian Arabs. Hostilities between Jews and Arabs had considerably increased as more and more refugees from Nazi rule struggled to enter Palestine. After 1939, when the British government decided to limit Jewish immigration, relations between Jews and the British Mandate also deteriorated. I remember many days on which curfews were imposed on the city. I would spend hours leaning out of our window, throwing sweets and chewing gum to the friendly British soldiers patrolling the street below. I very rarely entered the Arab parts of the city, as they were regarded as too dangerous.