We crossed the road and waited for a bus to take us as near Levington as it could; got off by a road bridge and crossed the railway line – and on, and on, and on, it seemed until, as directed, we took a left hand turn at a T-junction and came to an old thatched pub, The Ship. By this time we were very hot and dusty, so a drink of lemonade seemed a good idea. While we rested and looked over the Orwell estuary the elderly publican pointed out the house we were looking for, a distant blur right down by the water.

“You go down across this field,” he said, “through that gap, across the next field, then across the marshes until you come to a plank across the ditch. Cross that and follow the path alongside the water and you’ll come to it.” It seemed a long way for little legs, already tired but Gale was brave and we enjoyed walking on grass.

As we crossed the plank it did occur to me that it might be difficult to move a piano into the house if we decided to live there. At last we arrived.

I hated it – or rather them. The empty double-dweller was high shouldered and ugly. Inside the walls had cracks the wrong shape in all the rooms and I seemed to feel an atmosphere of menace. In the bare and weedy space that should have been gardens, a headless doll lay by an unprotected well-head. Between the houses and the river lay a wide strip of black, smelly, dangerous looking mud, and there were a lot of large black flies gathering round us.

Desperate as we were for somewhere to live I suddenly knew that nothing would induce me to live there, however cheap it was. I tried to sound cheerful and coax Gale into facing the long, long walk back to the bus. She, too, seemed glad to leave, and we sang, plodded, ran, dawdled back, picking some rushes to plait, gathering a few wild flowers to take with us, thankful to reach the lane at last and the final test of the long lane to the bus stop. Luckily we did not have too long to wait, and thankfully we rode back to Ipswich and the safety of London Road.

“We’ll get something really nice for Daddy’s tea,” I promised Gale, wondering how I was going to explain why we couldn’t live in a country cottage available to let at only one pound a week.
Peter didn’t try to persuade me to change my mind, which was just as well, because in the 1953 floods that house was completely swept away.