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adorned like birds of paradise in pretty dresses and gathered skirts, hemmed to reveal no more than your ankles, in high-necked blouses with modest sleeves that hid both elbows and wrists. He was very disappointed to see the war eroding this edict, and more and more females swaggering about in men’s attire. By the way, I abide by his code. And this not simply out of respect to a principled man, but because I have come to share his dictum: ‘Let men be men and women be women.’ You only have to look at Romans 1, verse 26 and 27: ‘For their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural, and in the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the women and burned in their desire towards one another.’ I think that clarifies the Almighty’s position on cross-dressing rather succinctly, don’t you?
    Papa did not hold with face painting either. I am not my father’s clone , and yet I have come to share his views. Women seem to have gone mad since the war ended, smearing their faces with anything they can get their hands on. ‘What are they trying to hide, Harriet, with their cow eyes and their mouths all red and greasy?’ Papa used to say with a sneer. ‘Trollops, every one. Soap, water and truth is all you should require. What need of the tricks of Jezebel here?’
    Papa did not encourage friendships with other girls. And socialising with boys was an unbreakable taboo. I was twenty-three before he permitted me to interact with men. I met Merfyn at a church social. I had come, by then, to reconcile myself to the fact that marriage might not be God’s will for me. It certainly did not seem to be my father’s. Perhaps it was my lot to care for him, I reasoned, and not for a husband. But no sooner had I resigned myself to spinsterhood than Merfyn Pritchard, a member of our Baptist church’s congregation, asked my father for permission to court me. The resemblance between them was uncanny. My suitor was scholarly, sober and dependable. An exponent of the Bible, he held it was the only book that repaid regular revision, that publishers of the modern prurient novel were in league with Satan.
    Besides these attributes, he possessed a trump card, his rigorous adherence to punctuality. Papa venerated punctuality in others. Living his creed, he referred constantly to the silver pocket watch tucked into his waistcoat. ‘If you say you will arrive at seven o’clock in the evening, then it behoves you to do precisely that. Indeed should you be either premature or tardy, you are less of a man in my opinion, for you have given your bond and failed in the expectation of it.’ Merfyn did not have a pocket watch, he had a wristwatch. Nevertheless he consulted it quite as much as my father did, if not more. They were also of one mind regarding the importance of temperance. ‘To imbibe,’ Merfyn told my papa before taking me to a tea dance, ‘is to descend the stairway to damnation.’
    I am no wavering daisy, more of the hollyhock in build and stature. I have my father’s firm chin, his pointed nose. And if I am the hollyhock, then Merfyn is the sturdy oak. With rumours of war flying about, I needed a crutch to prop me up. It may not sound romantic to you but then I am a realist. Regarding me through his horn-rimmed spectacles, Merfyn also appeared content. He saw a tall woman, a woman who did not baulk at physical toil, a woman with an honest open face, brown eyes and curly ebony hair, a woman who valued modesty over vanity in dress. The curls are my one indulgence – curling irons. Through my own round lenses, I perceived a man an inch or so shorter than myself, a man who, in suit and tie, his frizzed hair oiled down, did not offend the eye. He’ll do, I thought. And no doubt he thought, she’ll do, and the match was made.
    Merfyn is originally from Wales, Pembrokeshire, a Buster Keaton lookalike, though somewhat heavier set. If he had an accent once all but the barest trace of it is gone.