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racer. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the blood pouring down and realised more than ever that I should have to act out my part. Since I’m no actress this would have been difficult, but the cider had made me sleepy and I closed my eyes while some strong young men, with Chas holding my hand, assisted me to a van which took us back to camp, me to bed, and Chas to the first-aid post. I had to lie in bed for a couple of hours then make a fragile appearance in the evening. ‘How brave she is,’ said Lil. The owner of the racetrack thought I was a wonderful girl for I assured him I was ‘fine’ when he called, very worried that he would have to pay compensation, for he assumed the accelerator had stuck or been faulty in some way. Poor man, his race-track was out of order for a whole week and the strange thing about the whole affair, in retrospect, was the fact that Chas insisted there were no monkeys there!

Chapter 3
To Dorothy — a House
    It was back to Greenwich and a calmer life, I hoped, after our racing holiday. I think Chas hoped so too and we were both looking forward to the following week-end when we were to entertain my in-laws to Sunday lunch. They were all lovely people and we got on famously, so as the day drew near Chas and I were quite excited. He had the day off and helped me with the preparations. Just as my parents were opposite personalities, so were Chas’s mum and dad. As a very young girl, almost a child, she had worked in a weaving-shed in her Suffolk village where the young people had a rough time with the overseer, a grim-faced woman, who would lash out at them with a piece of wood from the spinning Jenny. After her friend’s teeth were knocked out by this woman, my mother-in-law, Ethel, not being adept at the spinning of the delicate silk thread, decided she would be better off in domestic service. Ethel was a woman who was never still, or so it seemed to me, never pausing in her cooking, cleaning and polishing. She cleaned her windows throughout the house inside and outside every week and I was very surprised when I saw her ironing her dusters as carefully as though they were delicate articles of lingerie. She laughed at my astonished stare and said, ‘I hope you won’t be such a fusspot as I have been all my life,’ whereupon I confessed to her that I ironed only the collars, fronts and cuffs of her son’s off-duty shirts. She thought me very clever and said I would have more time for getting on with life, that cleaning etc. is not living. She told me I would have to work on Charlie as he was over-conscientious like her and if I didn’t watch him he would ‘work himself’ to death, which, of course, was really what my dear ma-in-law did, being unable to relax. Perhaps the mothers of those days had been brought up in too hard a school.
    Alfred, my father-in-law, was as introvert as his wife was extrovert. He was so shy that he resented any intrusion of strangers into his family, and for weeks and weeks he ignored me. when I first went to his house, indeed he almost sat with his back to me, but once having been accepted by him I had a friend for life. Characterwise I think he was the most marvellous man I have ever met, for his life read like a Greek tragedy, yet never once was he embittered by his suffering, always ready to help those less fortunate than himself. He was passionately fond of children and after Christmas dinner at his house he would collect from each guest money for Dr Barnardo’s children’s homes at Stepney, then he would put in more than he could really afford and walk with it in rain or snow to the orphans’ home. He had been orphaned at an early age, the memories of his mother, Miranda, so faint in his mind that he felt he had to keep recalling them in case he should lose them in the mists of time. He always thought that he had been born in Cork but that his stepfather and stepmother had brought him to