We waited an interminable time for a coach to Cheltenham in an untidy shack in the middle of Gloucester Green, which is distinguished by being the only square of its area in Oxford unfurnished with a single blade of grass. A pleasant little Welshman was there and he told me of a free library he was building for Swansea University. He was short, with the blue serge suit and clean-lined face of the traditional Welsh miner. He got bored with us soon, and his sad and inscrutable eyes became fixed permanently and indifferently on the splashing rain outside. So Diana and I retired to a little rickety table and had a rather irritating conversation about the difference between sentiment and sentimentality and whether it was preferable for one’s lover to have had a full and sensible past with another woman (man) or to have had a stupid and dilatory series of useless amours. The advantages of the first were mainly Practice and Experience in Amatory Intelligence, but the second meant that there was (in some senses at least) virgin soil for the right man (woman) when he (she) came along. The bus fortunately appeared in the middle of all this.

The unfortunate argument continued a little on the coach, but it was soon mutually dropped as incompatible. And as we were driven along from Oxford it was like casting another skin – all the piled up complexities and futilities of Oxford life were left behind and we were talking amicably and sensibly about friendly and sensible things. It rained gustily most of the way but froze up again when we got into Andoversford. We watched the driver’s windscreen alternately freezing on the heights into fan-shaped patterns, and dribbling and weeping wherever the thaw had definitely set in.

Then the snow got deeper and thicker and whereas in the Witney fields it was lying in patches like pocket handkerchiefs drying on the grass in summer, past Burford most of the fields were dead white and there were huge pure drifts against the stone walls, in lovely contrast with the yellowy sludge at the edge where the cars had splashed and ridged it. But the landscape was dimmed by the falling snow, or, more often, great whirls of sleet and rain. And then – suddenly – Cheltenham, very wet and puddley, under a steely coloured sky.

We got out rather stiffly from the coach, I feeling rather self-conscious with my little knapsack and my stick in the middle of March. From a phone box I phoned up Day Lewis, the poet, who I had met recently at a poetry reading in Oxford, to ask him for a possible address where we might stay as it was obviously not walking weather. He came in a few minutes in his car and drove us to his home. A propitious start to our walking tour; it was four o’clock on our first day and we hadn’t walked ten yards.