call his bluff. One day he took Peter to see the boat he had nearly finished building on the Orwell near the Live and Let Live public house on the Westerfield Road. It was a four-berth beauty, just about finished down to the name proudly displayed on its prow “Mons Veneris”. He nudged Peter hard. “ You and I, Peter, are the only two people in Ipswich who know what that means.”

Once Gale was in bed and asleep he regaled us with stories of his life. He had seduced his wife, Little Darkey, when she was fourteen on Hampstead Heath. By the time she was seventeen and married with a young baby he attentions had wandered. He was driving a taxi at the time and she would watch him getting ready to go out, dressed up to the nines while she stayed at home. She knew he was being unfaithful and plotted revenge, buying a bottle of hair remover and carefully mixing it with his Brylcream, but they didn’t blend, so each morning she would have to be up first to give the bottle a really good shake and then get back into bed to watch him annoint his thick black hair really well and slick it back. Within three weeks, she said, he was almost totally bald, and it never grew again. When she went to see a doctor about a bothersome discharge she knew he was still at it, hair or no hair, as she was told she had gonorrhoea, so she left him and went back to mother with the baby. As soon as he was cured he coaxed her into having coffee with him, drugged her cup and kidnapped her and his daughter. She enjoyed the tales as much as he did, and seemed very proud of him. When he casually confided in Peter that tribes in the South Seas worshipped the male organ she was scandalised, “Worship it!” she cried. “Worship it. I’d spit on it.”

Still, there were no possible houses in the paper and nothing remotely likely from the estate agents. Someone, I forget now who, told us there was a farmer at Walton, near Felixstowe, a Mr Smith, who owned an empty cottage at Levington which he no longer needed for one of his labourers. He might be willing to rent it to us.

As soon as Peter went off to work Gale and I washed breakfasty faces and set off for the bus station to catch a red double-decker for Felixstowe although we didn’t need to go all the way. It was a lovely sunny day, warm already, and we were glad to be out of Ipswich and in the country.

We found Mr Smith in. The bus had put us down right by his farmhouse which was on the main road. He was reluctant to discuss renting out the house at all but in the end took pity on the homeless teacher’s wife – Gale’s big eyes looking up at him may have helped too – and said he would be willing to let it for a pound a week, but we had better go and see it before we decided. It was a bit isolated. Maybe this would be the answer to our problems.