The writer and artist Hans Scherfig and my mother were friends. We used to visit his house, and he once gave me a tortoise, Bosse. Scherfig was a biologist and a communist and dressed the part. His writings include a small pamphlet entitled The Pond, in which he compared the ecosystem of a pond with capitalist society. Later, he received the Academy’s prize and remarked that he felt the joy a drowning man must feel on being thrown a lifebuoy after having already struggled ashore by himself.

Before my brother died, he made me promise that all the Scherfig paintings in the family would be sent to Cuba through a communist friendship association. I kept that promise – almost. Slightly shamefully, I kept one picture that had hung in my mother’s room. That is the one now hanging in the exhibition.