(1) What made Dreyer's childhood emotionally arid by most accounts was lack of familial affection, partly motivated by his real mother, Josefina Nilsson, a Swedish maidservant, having failed to leave the Dreyers any money for child support.
(2) Compare that to how Indian maidservants – the aayahs and the bhaiyas – live.
(3) She remembers being, at the age of around 12, evacuated to the Cotswolds, where the 16-year-old maidservant at the vicarage got pregnant and drowned herself in the village pond (something similar happens in A Dark-Adapted Eye ).
(4) The living people revealed the painted people behind them like actors in the same performance, and flashing up before me was a little princess, her young maidservants and the artist himself, all gathered in a pool of sunlight below a heavy volume of shadow that instantly sets the tenor of the scene.