In 1915, when she was eleven, her father was killed in action in the Great War at the Scimitar Hill, part of the disastrous Gallipoli Campaign.

[2] Pansy Pakenham and her siblings had few friends outside their immediate family, which Lady Mary attributed to the out-of-date clothes that they wore as children.

[3] Mary's obituary in The Guardian in April 2010 said that the Longford children had had "a fierce independence of spirit and a positive relish for being different".

The two friends were mixed up in the affairs of the Bright young things,[1] and the novelist Alec Waugh described them as "more than usually pleasant examples of the Modern Girl, emancipated but not brassy.

[1] The Lambs set up home in the small Wiltshire village of Coombe Bissett, where they had three children, first two daughters, Henrietta and Felicia, and finally a son, Valentine.

In 1945, she wrote to her friend Evelyn Waugh, commenting on his new book Brideshead Revisited: You cannot make me nostalgic about the world I knew in the 1920s.