Real name,  Galamina Fernandez. But Janet liked having Leach as her last name. Nice and short, and she didn't have to explain it or spell it — which was always an argument at school. Plus the English teachers didn't like foreign girls.

Janet was born in Brighton, to a Portuguese father who was an artist with green fingers, and an English mother who refused to live in a group. Her grandmother — another Galamina — held court in the biggest room of a tall house in South London, where the aunts cooked, exotic animals roamed, and the family arranged itself in layers from the basement to the roof, in the Portuguese way: Grandmother top and centre of the family. Up on the roof were the studios, because of the good light. Gwen and Augustus John were up there and as a child, Janet would frequent their studio.

During the war Janet would hurry to the basement when the air raids came — children toddling down the stairs carrying their little animals. Janet had a white mouse with a long tail. She made cardboard boxes for it with her Aunt Ali. They slept down there. She was about nine or ten, she thinks, and she was frightened. One morning she looked out of the window and the house opposite was gone. ‘It was just dust’.

Janet met John on a date her mother disapproved of from the start. He was younger than her. He had no transport. It was snowing like mad and she had sausage sandwiches, with mustard. He told her much later that the mustard did it. A year later, they married. He brought her to Rottingdean. Janet wasn't looking forward to meeting his mother… ‘She was a Gorgon’. When they met, finally, she looked Janet up and down and said: I liked the first one better.

A varied life of work and art, Janet sculpted, ran a poetry group. She did a book. She cast faces in resin and sent the expensive ones to Fulham to be done in bronze. She had a gardener called Stephen for eight years. She buried a pram in the garden in the middle of the night because John would never go to the tip.

She had three children: Deborah, Tim and Madeleine. And ten grandsons. When she was ill and went to hospital against her will, they slept on her floor one after the other, alternating, and never left her. Janet found that amazing.

One grandson, Felix, is conducting research at university in Japan.

Her husband, John had Parkinson's. He was suffering and she couldn't do anything about it. He was the untidiest man she ever knew. He used to go to work looking terrible. He was the only man who could make her laugh — really laugh, belly laugh. She thinks he knew she loved him.

The conversation below was recorded in her home in Rottingdean. She made the Kipling waxwork that stands in The Grange — a few streets away, in the village where she has lived most of her life.