how Molly Parkin's real-life colourful as her paintings

Memoirs of a Victorian Gentleman by Frank Harris.

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“He put a little bit of brown paper round that and he said, 'This is what you have to have if you're taking it on the Tube because that’s pornography and Dylan Thomas is poetry and if you go through life embracing both those aspects you can’t go far wrong, Moll.

“James taught me how to enter a room and bring the sunshine in with me. He had that effect on people, he was a larger than life personality and he set the mode for the people who I would be drawn to for the rest of my life.”

At the same time, Molly was teaching art at Silverthorne Secondary Modern School in the Elephant and Castle area of London and loved her day job, but it was soon to change.

After her father died in 1957 she ended her affair and married. Molly says her choice of husband was heavily influenced by her mother.

“My mother said to me, ‘We need a new man in the family and it’s up to you now!

“She told me, ‘You can choose anybody, there’s no lack of suitors, but I'd prefer it if you'd take a public schoolboy!

“She wanted someone who had either been to Eton or Harrow and university educated, either in Oxford and Cambridge.

“If he’d done his National Service, then he had to have a commission,” she laughs.

At a party given by Molly’s friend, Irish journalist Mary Holland, within a month of her father's death Molly had met her first husband, art dealer Michael Parkin.

“He was a toff and a lovely man. He had to put up with me for about nine years.

“It was in many ways a glorious marriage. We were the centre of intellectual life in London, we lived in a lovely house in Old Church Street in Chelsea and it was the '60s so we were riding the wave of it all,” she remembers.