Spikey had been staying with friends near Diss a year or two back and had been taken to Cedric Morris’ garden in Hadleigh. She came back with a large bag of iris corms. Cedric bred his own, and these were new but not quite different enough to be shown and named except for one or two – Great Lakes, I remember, a beautiful clear blue, and Cleo, a greenish, yellowish grey, and very pale and delicious. Now they had made, so she was able to give us a sack full so we were able to plant up a whole long iris bed between the lawn and the shrubs that we were collecting to divide the pleasure garden from the utilitarian vegetable bit. Everything was carefully noted down by Peter in his little blue book. I was amazed, as I read it through, how many plants he had cadged and how many he managed to grow from seed, all carefully listed in alphabetical order with their Latin names.

Then the time came to sow the lawn in front of the mill, or rather, at the back of the house, but the real front, facing north to the right of way, had hardly any interest for a gardener. We couldn’t afford a roller. Graham helped Peter dig over the area to be sown with grass seed, removing several barrow loads of horseradish roots – then we enlisted the help of three of the Campbell children; the baby, Rachel, was of course too young – borrowed Bob’s ladder again – tied rope onto both ends, and asked the children to sit on it while the men dragged it back and forth across the ground. We did have a rake, so they alternately raked and dragged the ladder until they got it as near level as possible. We had bought the cheapest grass seed, pure rye grass, as we needed a tough area of grass and had no ambitions to have an elegant English lawn. Peter sowed broadcast after measuring out enough seed for each square yard, and we sat back and hoped the birds would leave us enough to cover the soil when it germinated. We knew it would be useless to sow right up to the house to be, so left a strip of earth to become a terrace later. Later, having bought more seed than we needed, we sowed the spaces between the fruit trees intending to let that grass grow long and have it cut once a year with a scythe.

During this, my second pregnancy, Peter suffered much more than he had when I was expecting Gale, probably because he was with me more of the time. As before, I was perfectly well and exhibited no symptoms except growing larger; but he began to complain of sickness (morning), stomach pains, and general disability. Luckily, except for his precious garden and his school work, there was not much he had to do.

I see in his 1949–50 Garden Book that he kept writing in “Dry Wall”. It was too great a task for him alone and he never got started on it until he brought down a group of his sixth formers. While I cooked them an enormous stew on the primus and oil cooker they set to.