“Of course, So-and-so is married to his sister, but he doesn’t know,” he said calmly – and then went on into a long story about one of his mates going back unexpectedly to his council house in Trimley only to find his wife on the bathroom floor with a young man called Bull.
“What the hell do you think you are doing?” he shouted.

“If you don’t like this,” she replied calmly, “you should see what he gets up to with your daughter!”

There were plenty of such stories, enough to last for the whole of the laying of the floor.
“Building workers see much more than people realise,” he explained. “We are on the roof and up ladders and people don’t look up – so they think they are safely hidden.”

The floor in place, our strange bedroom with its central post was nearly ready for us. Now all we had to do was to wait for the windows to arrive. This didn’t actually happen until the second week in October by which time it was getting quite cold and damp to be still in our tents. Just as soon as they arrived we alerted the removal people who were to bring what little furniture we owned from London.

“I’ll get the windows in place in a weekend,” Graham had said. Sure enough he did and on October 19th our furniture, such as it was, arrived in the pouring rain, and we moved in.

Upladder

• The bed in which I was born, cut down and used head to tail without the tall headboard
• Gale’s bed
• Gale’s cot
• An officers-for-the-use-of and chaff mattress

Downladder

• One old scullery table
• 3 elegant dining room chairs and 1 carver*
• 2 wicker chairs that talked all night after you got out of them*
• 1 elegant old sideboard (2 levels – cupboard and 2 drawers)*
• 1 elegant bottom half of dresser with 2 drawers
• 1 borrowed upright piano

* Bought in Caledonia market by my fat aunt Gertrude and presented to us now we had a house? to put them in. [Note: the question mark was in the original manuscript! SW.]