warm damp breath. She was terrified. For months afterwards she was convinced that there was a giraffe on the kitchen stairs.

Peter decided it was time to arrange a holiday back in Cornwall from which we had been so rudely wrenched in 1939. So now, in 1946 we planned a group to go back to the field above the cliff in Kennack. Gale’s friend Margaret was to come with her mother and aunt; one of the doctors from the Peckham Family Health Centre would bring his wife and two children to join us for part of the four weeks and Honour Arundel, a journalist who wrote for the Daily Worker, and her 50-year-old Red Indian husband who worked for the Water Board brought their eleven-month-old baby. We travelled at night and for the only time in our lives booked berths in a sleeper, one for Peter and one for me and Gale. The camping equipment we had of course sent on in advance.

And for four weeks it rained.

We had three 60mph gales. All the tents blew down several times, one on a lighted primus. The doctor and family, having come in a car, went home. The rest of us had, for several days, to take refuge, Peter, Gale and I in the farm’s bike shed and the rest in a hayloft which seemed very warm, soft and comfortable but where they all got bitten quite badly.

It was the year of the worst cigarette shortage, and we all smoked. We had arranged for friends to send us supplies, but they didn’t. So one of us, each day, had to make the twenty-four mile round trip to Helston, to return, if lucky, with ten tenners, small disgusting cigarettes reputed to be made from the sweepings of cinema floors. Ten divided by six won’t go – so we bought a tiny pipe, dismantled the cigarettes and passed a pipe of peace round the circle.

We kept telling each other it couldn’t last – the weather must clear up eventually – but it didn’t. Although we were all wet through most of the time no-one caught a cold – in fact it was quite warm so we wore bathing dresses under macintoshes, which looked indecent but wasn’t. Nearly everyone was good tempered. Only the Red Indian tended to sulk in his tent. Perhaps he was too old for such an adventure. Finally we arrived home, damp but none the worse.

By now everyone was demobbed so the house had filled up. My niece, Jill, ten months younger than Gale, lived with her parents on the top floor. David and Spikey occupied the next one down, Peter, Gale and I slept on the ground floor, and we all used the basement “kitchen” as a living room.