He was. Now our remaining money would last until he got paid. The house was clean and comfortable and not nearly as expensive as a hotel. I could use the kitchen. Peter could concentrate on his work. He found the Suffolk boys difficult at first. There was none of the lively insubordination and sparky taking up of opinions he had been used to dealing with from the East-Enders. There, besides being half girls the pupils had been about an eighth Jewish, mainly third generation Polish Jews now working on the Docks or running stalls in West Ham market. Here, besides being 100% boys, his classes were also almost one hundred percent Suffolk born and bred. There was no bad behaviour. There was no response at all! The boys sat stolidly, did what they were told but no more. Most of them spoke fairly broad Suffolk if and when they did speak. It was very hard work.

Gale and I visited all the house agents to ask about cheap cottages in the country and were given a handful of brochures advertising expensive bungalows on the suburbs of Ipswich – but now we were settled in rooms we could afford we could give our minds to house-hunting. It didn’t seem worth sending Gale to a school for a few weeks only to change her again. Mr and Mrs Barber were a constant entertainment and almost compensated for the dearth of country cottages. He announced himself as an ex-spiv – a balding smooth-looking man who seemed to have plenty of money, but no obvious means of livelihood, though his wife and daughters worked hard enough keeping the house clean and polished. Occasionally the two older children went to school, but since their mother never left the house they were needed at home anyway to do the shopping.

Each teatime brought Peter back with the Ipswich Evening Star and as soon as Gale had been kissed and tea poured out we turned to the Houses to Let (generally none) and Homes for Sale (very few). It didn’t really occur to us to wonder how we were going to be able to buy a house without any money on a teacher’s salary. Three years before we had taken out an endowment policy with the Woolwich for one thousand pounds which seemed a lot of money until we looked at the prices.

One or two did seem possible. There was a cottage over at Debach – Ray kindly took Peter over on his motorbike to have a look – two and a half acres of garden, the advertisement said, and £950 freehold! There was no bus to and from the village, so no way Peter could get to school, but maybe we could think of something. His face when they got back told the whole story. The rooms were tiny, he said, but what was worse, there was no room in which he could stand up – someone had poured concrete on all the floors so the headroom had been reduced to five feet six inches. And the two and a half acres were a disused sand pit