"Aunt Alison was like the skeleton in the cupboard we might all turn into if we didn't behave," says Phillipa. Alison features in their family mythology as a woman who had been driven mad by her circumstances. Wanting to know more than this, Phillipa set about piecing the story together.

Alison was born in 1909. She and her brother were often farmed out to relations because her parents were in the Colonial Service, abroad. From a baby to about five years old, Alison was brought up by relations to whom she became very attached. Out of the blue, her mother, Phillipa's great aunt Ada, returned and reclaimed her daughter. "From that day on Alison and her mother's relationship was very rocky," says Phillipa, "She was taken from people she knew and loved, to go with someone she didn't know at all. No-one had prepared the children, they thought they were too young to know any different. Alison was very unstable from that day on."

Great aunt Ada was a difficult woman, "an absolute tyrant." Phillipa's father and his sister stayed with great aunt Ada, with Alison there, and had a miserable time of it. Red-haired, great aunt Ada lived in Grassmere, and Phillipa reports, "She used to throw them out of the house as soon as daybreak came, with a so-called picnic - a slab of cold meat and a bit of bread - and told them not to come back until dusk." Whilst Alison's father and aunt, didn't fare too badly, Alison was "treated like dirt. She was bullied and could never do anything right. My father puts her whole unstabelness down to her mother." Alison's father doesn't make much of an appearance in the story; the feud was really between mother and daughter. No-one really knew why the relationship was so fraught. It was possible that Ada felt guilty about leaving her children with other people, and was hurt when she returned and Alison didn't love her instantly.

In her late teens, Alison was active and fun to be with, but always moody. "As soon as she got near her mum, it was impossible," says Phillipa, "She just couldn't get away. In those days she wasn't encouraged to make any sort of life or career for herself. She was there to look after mum."

This relationship was threatened when Ada was widowed, and she and twenty-year-old Alison went on a cruise. Alison fell in love with a steward on board ship, who, according to her mother was totally unsuitable. "When the cruise was over, Aunt Ada scuppered the relationship. She intercepted the mail. Alison had no idea why the steward never wrote to her. But when Aunt Ada died, Alison discovered the truth." Asking round her family, Phillipa found there were differing versions of how Alison found out what had happened, "Some say Alison found the letters in the trunk in the attic. Others say that Aunt Ada confessed to it on her death bed. Either way, Alison, at fifty years old, lost her mind."

The discovery caused Alison's behaviour to change dramatically, "She used to strip naked and lie in the road, ride a bike in the nude, pinch milk bottles from doorsteps and smash them or cover herself in milk," says Phillipa. In Woodbridge in Suffolk, it wasn't the type of behaviour they were used to. Alison was sent away to a mental institution without much delay and spent nearly forty years there, dying only two years ago, at the age of eighty-nine.