I belong to that distinctly British genus of women who went to boarding school in the 1950s. I sleep with the window open; I would still win the Tidiness Cup; my posture is excellent for one in her ninth decade; I can knit, badly; I can pack, expertly; my hospital corners are second to none; I can eat anything put in front of me; I seldom make a fuss and I have never made a scene; and compulsory Sunday afternoon walks in the Malvern Hills have put me off walking for life. Occasionally, I catch myself using the word “super”.

I was conceived before the outbreak of war in that fateful summer of 1939, and born while bombs dropped on nearby Coventry on April 2, 1940. The youngest of four – Gillian, Jeremy, Richard and me – my home was suburbia, a substantial, detached, red-brick Victorian house, bought for £1,685 in 1938, according to my father’s meticulous records. It was on Hampton Lane, the smartest part of Solihull, which remains about the smartest part of the Midlands. Food rationing had begun. My father, Norman Lancaster, had been called up, but after ten weeks of active service, he was recalled to Birmingham to run an armaments factory that made shell casings.

As for most of my generation, the war cast a huge, dark shadow over our early years. It had a brutalising effect on many of us, forcing us to be tough and cultivate a stiff upper lip. Not that I suffered personally. In spite of rationing, there was always nourishing food on the table, and plenty of it. My mother, Betty, flirted with the butcher to get the best cuts of meat, and I developed a taste for tripe, pig’s trotters, pigeon, brawn – and, best of all, oxtail soup. My mother was a good cook, possibly because it was one of the few ways in which she could express her creativity, which was otherwise stifled. We certainly weren’t hard-up, but we didn’t have any luxuries either. I don’t think anybody was seriously wealthy in those days (no one we knew, anyway). We were solid upper-managerial Midlands middle-class. We had staff: a nanny, a live-in housekeeper, a daily cleaner and a gardener. We were privileged, but we didn’t know it; I don’t think we were spoilt brats. We were expected to make our own beds and clear away and dry up after meals. When our measly weekly pocket money ran out, that was that.

Summer holidays were a fortnight in Devon or Wales and, just once, in Scotland, until my father splashed out rather uncharacteristically on a holiday house in Devon. This was in the village of Shaldon, on the estuary of the river Teign, where my mother had grown up. From when I was ten, we all decamped there for two weeks at Easter, and a month in the summer. The house was let out for the rest of the year to cover costs. Clichéd as it may sound, those holidays in Shaldon were the happiest of my life. And, yes, the sun always shone. I burnt lobster pink, blistered, and turned back to white. The days were spent rock climbing on the red rocks, shrimping in rock pools, sailing in a dinghy named Tess of the d’Urbervilles by my pretentious brother Jem, mackerel-fishing and barbecuing our catch on the beach the moment we got back. Sometimes I sketched. It was heaven. School friends of my brothers turned up – one of them I remember, Joe Meynell, in an open-top Triumph TR2. When my friend Sue Davies, who lived not far away in Totnes, came to stay, it was even more enjoyable. We went off to the Shaldon Hop on Friday nights or to the cinema in Torquay, seven miles away. I have spent my life failing to find Cornish pasties as delicious as the ones we ate then.

My father, born in Yorkshire in 1906, was the piggy-in-the-middle, between overindulged Basil and suave Vernon. His parents had made sacrifices to send the boys to Rossall, a minor public school in Lancashire, after which my father studied chartered accountancy and moved to Birmingham, the successful candidate out of 700 applicants. His aspirational mother was delighted. She had worked as a milliner when times were hard, and she considered Birmingham to be ‘Down South’ and far superior to anywhere “Up North”.

As a child, I used to watch my father shave with a cut-throat razor before he left for work, wearing spats, a stiff, detachable white collar and a bowtie. Like many of his type, he was a man of habit. Every month, he put on a bowler hat to go to a board meeting at the headquarters of Joseph Lucas in London. We – I – hadn’t the slightest idea what his work entailed. My father wrote a memoir towards the end of his life, which, alas, records nothing personal, but details the anodyne aspects of his business life and my brother Jeremy’s business career. He notes that when he left Tube Investments and joined Fillerys Toffees in Birmingham (suppliers of confectionery to Marks & Spencer), his salary dropped 50 per cent from £10,000 to £5,000. He records that he sold Sparrows Nest for £42,500 in 1978, ten times what he had bought it for. He seldom uses adjectives or adverbs, so I have no idea how he felt about these financial highs and lows.

My father had a peculiar relationship with money. You might call it money-itis, a sort of disease. He wasn’t mean, but he was very careful. Money frightened him. He was suspicious of wealth and frowned on it. He routinely refused what he regarded as overgenerous pay raises because he was worried about upsetting the rank and file. He was undoubtedly conscious of the poverty caused by the Depression in the 1930s. When my brother Richard came home one day without his boots, which he had taken off in a field and forgotten about, my father beat him with a wooden crop, which must have been a relic from his army days when he learnt to ride. It was not the only time Rich was beaten, either at home or later at school at Rugby. My father always punished carelessness or waste. He was very anti-privilege, hated Old Etonian entitlement and abhorred conspicuous consumption.

In retrospect, I think my parents were far too frugal with themselves and with us all. As a result, I’ve always tried to be much more easygoing about spending, though my daughter, Anjali [Tendulkar] doesn’t see it that way. My granddaughter, however, might; in a moment of extravagance, I bought Sara [Tendulkar] a pair of ridiculously expensive Chanel high heels for her twenty-first birthday. She wanted a designer handbag, but that would have been going too far. I still can’t stop myself being careful. I’m not generous by nature. I wish I was. I’ve tried to be more relaxed about money since coming to India, where I have often been struck by the fact that it’s always the people who have the least who are most generous.

Excerpted with permission from My Passage to India: A Memoir, Annabel Mehta and Georgina Brown, Westland.