anita's schooling was abysmal. she spent her childhood partly on a feudal estate in a country torn by conflict, partly in a london town-house where everyone in the 1920s seemed obsessed by cocktails, short skits, bobbed hair and eton crops, and partly in strange schools and convents in various parts of europe. but she always felt at home at castle leslie and her 1981 autobiography, "the gilt and the gingerbread", details her early childhood and eventual decision to leave the home of her grandparents and play her part in the second world war.