After a couple of lessons it was clear what was going on. It was a sex / nationalism thing. Señora H got her kicks from linguistically humiliating foreigners in their own language and paying for it. I was an English as a Foreign Language hooker. She was my john.

She was the wife of a Spanish officer in Franco's army, on attachment to the embassy in London. She paid well over the going rate for her lessons, even though her English was impeccable.

We would start each lesson with a few minutes of "everyday" conversation, which she liked to turn into a sort of syntactical tennis game...