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Hello. forward slash voucher. Hello and welcome to Spectator's Book Club podcast.

I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of the spectator.

And this week I'm very pleased to be joined by the author and critic Ariane Banks,

whose new book is called The Quality of Love, Twin Sisters at the Heart of the Century.

Welcome, Marianne. Now, this is one of those books that begins with a tin chest full of letters.

But unusually, for such family memoirs, it's not a chest full of letters about someone who

discovered that their grandmother, you know, either ran away from the Nazis or was a Nazi.

It's a much deeper and richer and more complicated story than that.

And it tells the story of the Padgett twins.

Who were the Padgett twins, Harriet?

So the Padgett twins were my mother and aunt, identical twin sisters born in 1916.

They were orphaned by the age of 12 because their mother died from

complications with their birth and their very beloved father died when they were 12, casting them,

as it were, into outer darkness. They grew up in very simple, a simple rural childhood in Suffolk.

With almost no friends, they didn't go to school.

They weren't sent to school, actually. From the age of seven, a retired village schoolmaster

walked up the lane and gave them one hour of lessons a day. My mother said she learned more

from the village schoolmaster in that one hour than she ever learned at any of the school

...