During the war, our family regularly travelled to Cornwall for a summer holiday. The trains were packed with troops and children; soldiers thronged the corridors. In my fevered recall, the journey, including frequent stoppages, took about eight hours. At one point my mother started, naturally enough, to breastfeed her new baby, at which point a clergyman (in a dog collar) sitting opposite with his daughter looked first horrified, then angry (Breastfeeding in European art: an image of everything Ukip abhors, 9 December). Eventually, with an air of disgust, he covered the little girl from head to foot with his own black coat like a shroud. I wanted to cry out indignantly: “What about the Virgin Mary?”
Seventy years later, I still regret that I didn’t have the courage.
Antonia Fraser
London
