middle of the mile-wide stretch of grass on Blackheath one very dark night when I became quite anxious to reach the lights of Blackheath village.

That summer too, I went to a League of Nations Conference in Switzerland. It was marginally interesting and I discovered Swiss ice cream – quite different from the watery English stuff. I wasn’t sure why I was there and was very homesick for Peter. Bernard Flood was the only other Oxford student. After one social evening he kissed me, what, for him, was passionately – then asked me how he could know I wasn’t pregnant with Peter’s child!! This left me even more speechless than usual. When I got my breath back I answered “Of course you can’t,” and left him. Thereafter I kept close to a father-like figure called Henderson, confided how much I was missing Peter, and showed him Peter’s photograph. When I got home Peter was there to meet me. He had been working and sunbathing in his family’s Bexley garden and was brown and healthy looking. We had a wonderful reunion.

That past term, as I have said, the Labour Club (Socialists) and the October Club (Communists) had joined together to form a United Front Labour Club with nearly 1,000 members. Now we returned to Oxford to attend an International United Front Student Conference. Peter was, of course, one of the organizers and often took the chair at the meetings. Meanwhile, I tended to be working on the Gestetner copier, the most advanced bit of office equipment in those days. First someone typed a skin to make a kind of stencil. The machine was then inked up – a very messy job – the skin was fitted carefully onto the machine and a pile of paper put into position. Finally, as the handle was turned, a sheet of paper was printed from the stencil, and then another, and another, until the ink ran out and had to be renewed.

Half way through that week Franco and his followers attacked the democratically elected Spanish Government, and the Spanish Civil War began. Of course, the delegation of students from Spain packed up at once and went home. A friend of Peter’s, a Cambridge student called John Cornford, went with the Spanish to help defend democracy. Later he was joined by others to form the International Brigade. Germany and Italy supplied arms and support to Franco – Britain adopted a non-intervention policy and denied arms to the people of Spain and their elected Government.

For a while Peter felt he should go to Spain, but I persuaded him that he wouldn’t be an asset to any army. We had a drink with John when he came home on leave that Christmas. A month later he was killed in combat.