His wife made us welcome and put the kettle on. As we chatted the 11 o’clock news came on the wireless, very faintly as the batteries were running down.

Suddenly we stopped talking and went closer to listen carefully as we heard, “Will all teachers from the following boroughs in London report back to their schools on Friday morning next”. It was now late Wednesday night. The only way we could do it was to catch the Cornish Riviera at Helston early next morning. But Helston was twelve miles away, and the bus left Kennack Sands at 7 am!

We walked back by road and woke up the farmer’s daughter, gave her our mackerel and begged her to call us as soon as it got light. We knew she would be up. Back at our tent we realised we had no water, no paraffin, no matches – and the remains of our last night’s party were all around us. Somehow we slept amid the chaos, soon to be woken at dawn. There was no way we could wash. I couldn’t even find my comb. We were still in last night’s clothes covered in mackerel scales. Hurriedly we packed up everything, wrapped it all in the ground-sheet to be forwarded to Blackheath, and what we could carry we packed into and hung round our rucksacks. We just caught the bus, driven by the man we called the “mad driver”. It was his habit to tease the Emmets by driving very fast up to the hotel in Mullian – to stop dead about six inches from the edge of the unprotected cliff.

This morning we asked him if there was any way we could get a drink of water.

“Never you mind, my dears,” he said, and stopped his bus in Mullian village. “Come on you two,” he encouraged us and took us into a cottage. “Make these dear people some tea,” he said to his sister, “I’ll be back for mine” – and he drove the bus off with its load of anxious passengers to collect more at Mullion Hotel, leaving us to our welcome cup of tea. By the time we were starting on our second cup he was back, leaving an even fuller bus load of frantic holiday makers to sit outside while he drank his. But we caught the train at Helston. The Cornish Riviera was pretty full of very clean and proper Headmasters and Headmistresses with their families – spick and span from their expensive hotels in Penzance. We found a couple of seats, dumped our rucksacks and went to have a very welcome wash, but there was little we could do about our fish scales or our hair.

When the train reached London we bought two newspapers, the Times and the Daily Worker, to find out what was happening. We were too dirty and smelly to go to Lyons, so we marched into the Ivy which was full of famous theatrical people, on the assumption that the richer people were, the less they would mind. It seemed to work well and we had a meal and read our papers. We had married just in time. War was imminent.