Alice Merrow

She is an art curator working in the London Portrait Gallery, a fictional art museum in London (obviously based loosely on the National Portrait Gallery). She’s been working there for fifteen years, her entire career since completing her post-graduate studies in Art Gallery and Museum Studies at Leeds University. Since then, she’s been working part-time on a PhD on Richard Cosway, the Regency miniaturist.

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Alice grew up in Hemel Hempstead in a conventional middle-class family. Her father was an accountant, her mother a teacher. She has two older brothers, Tim, an army officer, and Nick, a barrister. Her family are not especially artistic and can’t understand why Alice “wants to spend all day making lists of other people’s dusty junk.”

As a child, she was very close to her maternal grandmother, Sylvie who was French. She was a ballet dancer and, when she retired, she became a jewellery designer. She would stay with the family for weeks every summer and show Alice how to draw and make jewellery, and they would spend hours and hours in the museums, especially the V&A.

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Granny Sylvie also loved Bagpuss – a seventies children’s programme about big baggy old pink-and-white plush cat that lived in a shop with a rag doll and some felt mice and other characters. Emily, the little girl he lived with, used to bring him lost objects. Bagpuss and his friends would clean, mend and restore these items and Emily would place them in the shop window so their owners could reclaim them. But every episode the creatures in the shop would tell the story behind the lost things. Sylvie’s favourite episode was the one about the old ballet shoe which the mice turn into a rowing boat. Alice liked the one about the toy mill which made chocolate biscuits out of breadcrumbs and butter beans, which turned out to be a trick by the mice. Alice and Sylvie used to look through antique and junk shops finding old things and tell each other the stories that they thought those items might hold.

 

Although she’s a quarter French, speaks the language well and particularly likes French wine, she feels very English. Alice always wears the beautiful oak-leaf bracelet that her granny fashioned for her as a reminder of her English heritage. She shares Guy Tillingford’s passion for preserving England’s heritage and sharing it with others.

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Alice studied history of Art at University College, London, where she met her best friend Charlotte Patcham, currently residing in Bath, who plays a key role in uncovering the mysteries of Tillingford Hall and is the heroine of the sequel, Christmas at Tillingford Hall.

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Alice adores Jane Austen and has read all of her books several times. She’s a purist and, while she’ll enjoy a film adaptation, it really irks her when people get the period details wrong. Until her visit to Hampshire she’d never been to Jane Auten’s house in Chawton and absolutely loved her visit there. There’s a mug at Tillingford Hall which she particularly likes which quotes Sir Thomas Barton in Mansfield Park saying …indeed, I’d rather have nothing but tea, but the one she loves most is the one Guy bought her at Chawton House which says life seems but a quick succession of busy nothings. Although Alice isn’t quite sure the quote is correct, she loves the mug because Guy gave it to her.