In 1982, an advertisement for a nanny ran in The Lady. It read: ‘Disabled boy and his brother are looking for someone to look after them.’ The person hiring was Mary-Kay Wilmers, the co-founder of the London Review of Books, and the woman who answered the ad was 20-year-old Nina Stibbe, from Leicestershire. Stibbe didn’t have much experience of London or nannying. She had left school at 14 and was working in a nursing home, where copies of The Lady floated around. Stibbe drove down to Camden for the interview and her potential charges, Sam (10, with a neurological condition called Riley–Day syndrome) and Will (9) asked the questions. Eventually she was offered the job, packed up her stuff and moved into Wilmers’s large, terraced house at 55 Gloucester Crescent.