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seemed like November, but at least the invaders had chosen the proper time of the year. Cleo chose the worst of all possible times.
    Snow covered the whole of eastern and northern Britain; London looked as if it had been dressed for a Dickens Christmas. A razor-sharp wind blew in from the Russian iceworks; ducks waltzed drunkenly on frozen ponds; mini-skirts and hot pants suddenly were, if not out of fashion, out of sight under long heavy coats. Noses were red and fingertips blue and permissive love, a recently-revived English custom, suffered a sharp set-back: it is difficult to be uninhibitedly orgiastic in front of a one-bar radiator.
    In the United States Richard Nixon had been elected President and in England Enid Blyton had died; black crêpe was hung in Democratic wardrooms and in Kensington nurseries. The year was ending on the same gloomy note that had pervaded all the preceding months. In years to come people then in their youth would look back on that decade as the Swinging Sixties, forgetting the black periods. That year Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy had been assassinated, American youth was protesting about being drafted for a war it didn’t believe in, the Russians had invaded Czechoslovakia, an earthquake had killed 12,000 non-swingers in Iran. Cleo wondered why she had left the sunny bliss of ignorance that was the Australian climate. True, there had been anti-war demonstrations back home, but most of the population put on their sun-glasses, put their transistors to their ears, sank their lips into beer-foam, saw no evil, heard no evil, spoke no evil.
    She found a bed-sitting-room in a street off the Gloucester Road and for the first time in her life felt lonely. All at once she missed her mother. Brigid Spearfield had died in Cleo’s last year at the Brigidine Convent, where the nuns had thought how lucky Cleo was to have a mother named after their patron saint and how discouraging it was for them to have such a female devil as a pupil. Cleo had cried for two days after her mother’s death; then she had put her grief away inside her with her memories of her mother and got on with living. Now, in the dark, depressing flat she put the photo of Brigid on the chipped mantelpiece and wished that the serenely cheerful face could speak to her. She wanted someone to tell her she had done the right thing. There was no guarantee that Brigid, the least adventurous of women, would have told her that, but at least she would have offered her comfort. Brigid had always been very good at that. It only struck Cleo now, after she had got over the self-pity that had engulfed her, that there might have been times when Brigid herself would have welcomed some comfort, someone to tell her that she had done the right thing in always making herself subservient to Sylvester’s ambitions.
    Cleo went looking for work in Fleet Street. She was a little disappointed in the Street itself; somehow she had expected it to be wider, an avenue suggesting the power and influence it exerted. The buildings were unprepossessing but for the Law Courts at the western end; she hated the Daily Express’s art deco home and the Greek-Egyptian (as if the architect had been looking both ways at once) Daily Telegraph building. The worst of all was the Daily Examiner’s which looked as if it had started out to be a cathedral, decided to be a bank and finished up a barracks. She was only saved from total disillusionment with the Street when she went into the tiny courts hidden like cubby-holes for the affronted aesthetes off the main thoroughfare. She felt herself brushed by the ghosts of Johnson, Boswell and Dickens and decided to give Fleet Street another chance.
    She knew a few Australian journalists working in London, but she did not go to them for advice or contacts. She was determined to make it on her own; if she was going to be independent, the flag had to be planted right at the start. The Fleet Street editors were