Although we had been married for ten years we had never had anywhere to put furniture even if we had any. Of course we still used our camping things. The primus and slow oil stove sat on the sideboard next to the door.

That weekend we bought for £1 an old tortoise stove with a kind of chimney pipe which stuck out of the little east window and an Aladdin lamp which used paraffin. Peter and Graham put up a proper washing line for me. We invested in an Elsan, a portable loo which we put in our now empty tent, so we no longer had to use Yvonne’s lavatory, and within a few days the water company came to lay a water pipe up the right of way, ending in a stand pipe outside our door – so we now no longer needed to tread mud in and out of Black Mill House.

We settled in happily and Gale found it quite acceptable to be carried out, round and up in her red dressing gown at bed time. Luckily, it was a dry, warm autumn. And then, perhaps because we had been so busy to think about it, or perhaps because of the country diet, fresh air and exercise, in November we found I was pregnant.

We contacted the electricity people who sent a lovely man called Smith who worked away laying flex along the beams and made the place look like the engine-room of a liner, so that we had a lighting fixture on the four widest bits of the curved walls, one 5 amp plug upstairs and one down, and a fixing on the post in the middle of our bedroom. We were home, and living in comparative luxury.

Meanwhile, Peter had been planning his longed for garden.