Lucia was born in Vigo in Galicia at the north-western point of the Iberian peninsula of the family of the Luca de Tena y de Haz. Her father, Don Rafael, of Sevilla, came to live there when married Esperanza de Haz, a woman of Galicia. He ran a pharmacy in the Plaza de la Constitucion in Vigo and later taught the subject.

She was one of two babies of the family as her parents had two sons and two daughters before a gap of ten years brought her and her younger brother into the world. It was almost as if the older four were of a different generation – a generation, it must be said, of which I am also a member.

She did well at school and went on to Santiago university where she studied biology and then went on to do a master’s degree in botany. She was asked to lecture while doing this and told me once that she was surprised, on looking up from the lectern to see that most of the students she was teaching were older than her.

After we were married (her brother took the photos to save paying for a professional photographer so the only picture we have of the ceremony is of a part of his thumb) our lives took on a sort of routine. During her pregnancy she taught at a secondary school in Lewes as lab assistant until the birth of our daughter, Ana, and then as Spanish teacher at an adult education centre in Hove. At the beginning I was still working on my thesis and teaching TEFL at a local school to pay my way. Lucia settled in, learned English up to Cambridge proficiency and beyond. The teachers wondered how she found the time to study so much until they discovered she was a wife rather than an au-pair. She also learned to cook puddings as her mother thought marriage to an Englishmen could hardly last without sweets and sent weekly recipes through the post – no emails in those days!

Our holidays also followed a settled pattern. Lucia was always thinking of others so our summers were spent at one or other beach in Galicia with her mother and sister-in-law – the two Espés – until we had to return for the beginning of term in September.  Easter she usually left me in England to spend a couple of weeks back in Vigo and some years the two Espés came over also for Christmas. Not a bad routine except that it meant Lucia never really had a holiday in the sense of seeing the world. We did spend an academic year in Israel – which happened to coincide with the Gulf War so our movements were a bit restricted. The two Espés came over to visit also. A projected visit to Egypt was foiled when a bus full of tourists was hijacked and became headline news. My mother, also at her insistence was visited in London almost every other weekend and came down to us for Christmas and occasional other weekends.

This all taking place between our housing reclamation projects. A terraced house near Hove station which was almost a ruin with pigeon shit on the attic floor and 25 layers of wall coverings in the kitchen. At that point I was doing the plumbing and electrics until an electrician gave us an estimate which was less than I was paying for materials. Soon after my activities were made illegal. We moved from there to a three storey monster in a road full of nursing homes – we were on the ‘costa geriatrica’ – each room of which had been a bedsit with kitchen facilities and shared toilets. We did that one up room by room. The kitchen had three larders a servant’s room, a boiler room and breakfast room as well as the kitchen all or which had to be ripped out and reconstructed. From there we moved to a small semi-detached near the seafront which was in better nick. Lucia in good temper throughout all this which would have tested a saint.