While Peter was teaching the young people as Stratford Grammar School, I had been getting to know the mothers of other young people of Gale’s age. Whenever I was at 44 Lee Park I always tried to take her to the clinic. Soon there was a group of us, all with girls as it happened, and all the girls first children and within three weeks of one another in age. We would meet in the afternoons in the little park across the road at the bottom of Lee Park. This boasted a pond and nearby a little café where we could get a cup of tea even in wartime. We began to meet, some of us, most afternoons, park our prams and daughters by the railings to look at the ducks and socialise ourselves over tea. Ellie and her daughter Margaret became particular friends, as did Pat and her daughter who actually lived in our road, and Nesbitt Filtness with her extremely good, clean daughter.

Ellie and Margaret lived in an upstairs flat in a working-class road of two-storey houses with no gardens. The children had to play in the road. We decided to campaign for a nursery school so we canvassed that road with a petition, discovering sixty-five children under five among the residents. Of course we didn’t really expect to get anything done in wartime but hoped the idea would recur after the war.

Nesbitt too lived in an upstairs flat but solved the problem by taking her baby out all day to friends or the park and doing her housework in the evening.

Now that the war was as good as over we began to plan a summer holiday. My mother had a friend, Peggy Angus, who lived in a cottage in Glynde about eight miles inland from Brighton across the Downs. We wrote to ask her to find out if the local farmer would allow us to camp on his land – and got permission. Next we chose a few friends, Ellie with Margaret – Ellie’s husband was still in the Forces – and a John Manley and partner who had a baby just at the sieved vegetables stage. We renovated the tents, not used since we left them in Cornwall in 1939, and hired a little van from a greengrocer. This was open at the back with a hanging tarpaulin curtain, and was probably illegal for passengers but we didn’t think of that.
When term finished we packed ourselves in with all our camping equipment and luggage – a tight squeeze, and John drove us down.

We camped in the lee of a small copse planted on a slope, and shared the site with a herd of young bullocks. There was no fence or hedge between us and Brighton. As there was plenty of wood about we cooked on a camp fire. Gale and Margaret, not quite two, soon began to run about with no clothes on and Gale, quite fearless, would pick up a stick and chase the herd of bullocks down a little earth path through the trees behind us. They did always avoid