The wonderful and unpredictable Candida Lycett Green

With Candida, you learned to expect the unexpected. She said she might make the charity sale at my house on Thursday, but not to rely on her. I didn’t. But on Friday, a bright red pick-up truck turned into the yard and out got Candida with a bagful of contributions. But she also brought a birthday present of a beautiful Alice Temperley skirt for my younger daughter. The red pick-up was a present for Candida’s own birthday, thrilling her as much as any red bike for a six-year-old.

‘I’m an old hippy,’ she once said. Perhaps. She was certainly a child of the Sixties, when half the aristocracy’s offspring were hippies. She was not an aristo herself, though you could be forgiven for thinking it, just a remarkable free spirit, and her generosity didn’t stop — or start — at clothes by posh designers, either.

I arrived at Uffington once to find several children at the kitchen table scoffing a huge pile of buttered toast.