The fashion designer Jenny Packham was about five years-old when her brother, Chris, made her eat a tadpole.
“I have a very clear memory of the texture in my mouth,” she says now, some 50 years later when we meet in a central London hotel. “But maybe I blocked out the memory of swallowing it. I had that uneasy feeling of something happening that I was not that happy with.”
She laughs. Chris, the older by four years, is sitting opposite her - but refusing to admit his guilt. Still, he is not explicitly denying it either.
He was always fascinated by wildlife, Jenny says, and growing up in Hampshire, they would spend a lot of time outdoors “waiting for Chris to climb up trees and look into birds’...