As I gaze at my four children on Christmas morning, clambering on to the bed with their stockings, I will think of one particular person to whom, in a roundabout way, they owe their lives. He was a colonel in the first world war and, had it not been for his generosity, my children, their mother, her brothers and sisters, their children, their aunts, uncles and cousins — the entire Bondy clan, in fact — would not exist.