and wood and to serve as a box room. A wide imposing flight of stairs led up from the hall to a second bedroom, theirs. There was a pleasant garden.

As our sitting room had four ill-fitting doors it was full of draughts. The first thing we bought was a folding screen. The room was heated by a tiny basket coal fire set into the wall about 15 inches up. If we folded the screen right round our two chairs and kept the fire going well we managed to keep reasonably warm that cold winter. We all four ate together, sharing the cooking and each Sunday Clifford Smith and I went over the weekly accounts. One weekend I remember we spent two hours trying to find an error which made them a penny out. Peter offered to put a penny in, but Clifford was horrified. The error must be tracked down. We kept on finding little notes when we got in reminding Peter that the second peg in the passage had been allocated to him but he had hung his hat on the first again, Clifford’s. The two families were not ideally suited.

Mind you, Clifford Smith was an admirable man. He had obtained all his qualifications, Matriculation, Higher Schools Certificate, Degree and Doctorate all by correspondence courses. All his mature life he had gone to bed at nine – risen at five – worked for two hours before seven when he began to prepare breakfast for his wife who got up at eight and retired to bed at eleven. They had no children.

One evening as we sat huddled round our little basket fire protected by our screen we saw a black vase which stood on the floor full of paper spills for lighting cigarettes start to dance about!! “Peter,” I cried, “there must be a mouse and it must be roasting alive.” He knocked the pot over and we waited for a mouse to run out. Nothing! Peter tipped out the spills and peered inside. Empty! “It must have been a Poltergeist,” he said. So he spent some time writing out a spell against the supernatural in Elizabethan handwriting and pinned it onto the wall above the fire. We never found what caused it, and it never happened again.

Hardly had we moved into our shared house than I was asked to coach a couple of children; a girl aged twelve and her brother aged seven. They had been suffering from tubercular glands in the neck so had not been able to go to school. They could both read, write and add up. Next term they would be ready to attend a school but meanwhile needed to catch up. So they came to me every morning. They were both intelligent and we read widely, learning most of our Geography and History from story books, although we had text books as well. They enjoyed writing stories and could spell reasonably well – but they knew no maths.