The authors’ grandmother Iris Tree in 1920; as painted by Augustus John; and in 1955.

From Tree to Tree

The hidden history of London’s most interesting—and complicated—family

By Ivana Lowell and Jonathan Moffat

It should have been a warning, or perhaps at least an inkling, of things to come, but we were teenagers and couldn’t possibly have known.

Ivana was a 15-year-old wild child living with her mother, the novelist Caroline Blackwood, in a large, dilapidated house in London’s Redcliffe Square. Jonathan was a 16-year-old boarder at Westminster School. His father, the screenwriter Ivan Moffat, and Caroline had known each other from Hollywood when she had been an aspiring actress. On one of Ivan’s infrequent visits to London, our parents introduced us over a rather awkward—and, for them, boozy—lunch at Fortnum & Mason.