Still, I got there, and there was a splendid stew with rather floury potatoes and slightly tough cabbage. Why didn’t I relish it as usual, after the school lunch and the long, long afternoon? I seldom pushed my food aside hardly eaten but this evening I had little choice: I found I could hardly remember what food was actually for, and watched incredulously while Diana and Gale tucked in ravenously. What I wanted was to sit in a soft chair or even better lie down, and drift away if I could. Washing up in our smallish enamel bowl seemed a gargantuan task, and I admitted to Diana that I felt pretty ropey. She wisely suggested bed; Gale said “Poor Daddy!” several times and when I finally got into the rather bumpy bed upstairs I had no inclination to read: a dry throat and a slightly swimming head were sufficient symptoms to prevent me from even opening a single blue exercise book with 3B’s observations on “The Best Day of my Holidays”.

Next morning Diana insisted on taking my temperature and I found with a dull ache of surprise that it was 101 degrees. She went over to Bob’s house and asked him to report me as sick – a heavy day which I was only too happy to miss. I drank a good deal of tea and got down a little bread-and-milk, suitably soft for an invalid. I dressed with double the usual sweaters and was settled into our strange wicker armchairs with a thick blanket over my knees which enclosed but didn’t stop the shiver. By 8.30 the workmen were busy “next door”, hammering and laughing and shouting but still divided from me by the round brick wall. Diana was to take Gale to the dentist at 10.00, on the bus, but before that she went out of our front door and round to the building site, to be informed that today was the day when the hole for the linking door was to be knocked in the brickwork. Soon after this the two Smith brothers came in with sundry apologies and fastened a tarpaulin with slats hammered into the beams, to prevent the bricks actually flying through our sitting room. A few minutes later they started: there was an amazing thudding and booming noise (old brickwork being attacked has a note all of its own). Lumps of brick and rubble tumbled through the lower reaches of the tarpaulin and made a sizeable pile by my side. What I had not expected was that the whole room became quickly fogged with dust – the ancient chokey smell of eighteenth century mortar an soft, red brick. Neither helped my throat or my headache and I prayed that it would not go on too long.