"A handbag?" Edward Fox hears about Michael Medwin's childhood

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I've found it!

When I disappeared down the rabbit hole of the childhood of the British film actor and producer Michael Medwin in August, I came across an account of talking about it at some event where he shared the platform with Edward Fox. But I couldn't find it again after I emerged into the fresh air.

Now I have. I was thinking of an interview with Andrew Young of The Herald - Medwin was about to play Colonel Pickering to Fox's Professor Higgins in a touring production of My Fair Lady that was coming to Glasgow.

Young writes:

It was my innocent question about what I supposed to be his own Cockney roots that brought about the most remarkable revelation concerning his background. Home truths about which even Edward Fox (whowas sitting in on the chat) had be en completely unaware.

''I was one of life's social indiscretions,'' he said. ''Adopted and brought up by two maiden ladies in Dorset. In other words, I'm a bastard.'' This bold, freely-offered information provoked paroxysms of mirth in Fox.

A lucky bastard, as it happened. ''It was a most felicitious adoption. I had a halcyon upbringing and was not prepared for the world at all. Things were very quiet and lovely. The maiden ladies were a Dr Mary Jeremy, OBE, and a Miss Clockton Roberts. The former was an OBE because there were not many lady doctors around at the time and she had done much good work in India before the 1914-18 war.''

The ladies then ''put me through the local public school and then sent me off to what you might call a finishing school in Switzerland. Being maiden ladies, presumably they had it in their heads that that was the natural progression.

''I was with them until they died, Dr Jeremy when I was 12, and Miss Roberts when I was in my twenties. So I have no-one in the world. I have no relations that I know about.''

In tracing his ancestry back to his mother and father, all he had ever learned was that his mother came from Dublin and his father was Dutch.

''For a long time I kept hoping that I would be traced by someone who would tell me that I was a Guinness heir and that all this was mine.''

Fox, who would be an asset to any audience, had by this time gone into spasms of laughter that were obviously causing him great pain. ''A handbag? A handbag?'' he shrieked, Lady Bracknell-like, although, so far as he knew, Medwin had not actually been found in one.

Honestly, what is Edward Fox like? I can't understand someone who finds orphans funny.