Before the exquisitely painful 'loss of her marbles', Mrs Royle, a nurse by profession, is a marvellously no-nonsense character, an autodidact who reads widely and voraciously from Trollope to Woolf, White to Winterson - swears at her fox-hunting neighbours, and instils in the young Nick a love of reading and wildlife that will form his character and his career. He captures the spirit of post-war parenting as well as of his mother whose dementia and death were triggered by the tragedy of losing her other son - Royle's younger brother - to cancer in his twenties.