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stop whining ' Now see what you made me do!'' I acknowledged my part in my own misfortune. I really think my father heard. Whether he was there of course I have no idea: I do know that I spoke to him.
    At any rate it was after that my life turned: within days I fell out of love with the Dane, upon his confession of a drunken act of infidelity with a passing Danish tourist, waved goodbye to him as he set out for Ibiza to deliver some rich man's yacht, without dropping a single tear - the girl from Denmark had somehow lifted my moral responsibility to the wife, the miscarriage seemed a boon from heaven. I met Ron Weldon at a party, left my poor mother behind me, acquired a house and a home and a man of my own, and finally unafraid, grew rich and famous.
    I wept in public fifteen years later on the steps of White Centre at BBC TV when Graeme MacDonald told me that Smoke Screen , my just-screened Flay for Today - Wednesday nights, an audience of some thirteen or fourteen million -had not been a success with the audience and the BBC weren't going to commission me to do another. Not for a time. That was in 1969. The first reports into the link between smoking and lung cancer were emerging. The play had been successful enough with the audience, but not with BBC management. Their feeling was that I was causing trouble, stirring up unpleasantness, frightening the audience. I should stick to writing about women, not venture out into the great male world of important matters. Smoke Screen was about an advertising man, working on a cigarette account, who dies of lung cancer. My hero, puffing away, had a family to support, and insurance premiums to meet before he died, and felt that his duty to his family was higher than his duty to the public. And so by and large it is. What can a man, or indeed a woman, do in the face of necessity? What was I doing in advertising myself? The necessity of so doing was fast fading. I could keep myself in other ways.
    The ad agency, no doubt irritated by my lack of loyalty, my intransigency, called my bluff after Smoke Screen and asked me to work on the Players account. It was a challenge, and I declined it. My boss Douglas Haines, the handsomest man in advertising and a good friend ever since, told me my duty was to my employers rather than society. Docile though I thought I was, I found this difficult to accept. My employers' enthusiasm for me dwindled, as well it might, and eventually I was 'let go'. That, and no doubt my habit of filling in my hourly time sheets as a consultant so that I earned what I thought I deserved, rather than the ceiling limit suggested by an eight-hour a day week, finally drove my employers to action. I was filling in 30 or 50 hours a day, out of the available 24, and they took no notice, or pretended not to, until finally I went too far.
    'Be bold, be bold, but not too bold !' as the girl who marries Bluebeard in the fairy story is warned. I was too bold. Not only was there trouble at the office, but on the mythical BBC Honours Board my name was now in black, not gold, which meant ' 'Don't use her: trouble' and I hadn't even been trying. Disgrace, at the BBC, usually lasted for two years or so; after that time everyone up and down the corridors had been promoted or changed jobs, and had forgotten, and when your name came up again at a meeting there was no one who remembered the awful things you had done to speak against you.
    Morality, for all of us, tends to be what we can afford. Nobody wanted to believe what had to be believed. Smoking was nice, and natural and had a gentle tonic and hygienic effect, and we all went round in a cloud of smoke and since we all smelt like old ashtrays it didn't bother anyone. The only people who didn't smoke were those who couldn't afford to, which for many years had included me.
    Graeme MacDonald professed himself very surprised that I should cry. He said I did not seem the crying sort. I think I must have exuded an air of infinite good cheer,