‘Now!’ cried my grandfather, holding both my hands. The waves came fast and high, and each time one broke in frothy whiteness, he would lift me into the air. I never tired of splashing around in the sea, and nor did he.

‘Can we go further out?’ I asked.

‘No, the seabed has holes made by shooting stars,’ he said. ‘We might be walking in shallow water one minute and the next we’ll be neck-deep.’ I thought he was very wise. In one of my photos, he wears a straw boater, sunglasses, and blue swimming trunks.

The beach was the highlight of our holiday to the Lido in Venice. In the mornings we played in our hotel’s leafy garden. After lunch we met up with our grandparents on the beach; I remember my grandmother and mother lying in deckchairs all afternoon.

This was my first time in Venice – I was eight years old and my sister was four going on five. One day, we went to Murano and Burano – the glass- and lace-making islands. On Murano, my sister and I were each allowed to choose a miniature glass animal. Hers was a horse and mine a boxer dog like ours back in London. At home, the delicate animals lived on a long shelf above the stairs that was packed with a display of small ornaments.

Looking back on that holiday, I am surprised that no one mentioned the fact that my grandparents had spent their honeymoon in Venice in the 1920s. I only discovered this while researching my grandparents’ lives and leafing through the black-and-white photographs of my grandmother wearing the latest flapper dresses and paddling in the Adriatic in a modest swimming dress. I have a tiny booklet of photos, each one at first sight identical to the other. If you flick the pages fast, the people in the pictures come to life – like a pocket film show.