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big guns.
    So, father had money back then, and took on the tall house in Moribund Lane, with its narrow garden that backed onto the canal, and iron railings at the front. And we had a cook and a maid. Cook was a tiny red faced woman who used to like me to tell her stories of Greece while she worked in the basement kitchen. It was always so lovely and warm there, and she would never fail to make me a cup of tea which I would sip very politely at the big wooden table, since I was the lady of the house. Her name was Mrs Bramley, and I miss the warm kitchen – we cook over a miserable little spirit stove now and the basement is grey and cold most of the time.
    We had a maid too, whose name was Elsie Blythe, and she was much younger than Mrs Bramley, and she set the fires and did the ironing and made the beds and brought father his breakfast in the front room, kippers sometimes, and poached eggs all runny. And I remember how baffled she was by father insisting that olive oil be set out at every meal so he could dip his toast in it.
    Father used to go walking alone in Wytham Wood and forage for wild garlic, and he would rub it on toasted bread and drizzle the bread with oil and salt, and the smell was straight away like something out of a lost memory. No-one in England likes garlic or olive oil, and now even father has stopped eating it, and dines quite like an Englishman, and fries his bacon in lumps of suet, which is nice enough but not the same.
    I miss Elsie. She was young, and pretty, and always had time to sit and chat with me and Pie. She had such a pale face, with big blue eyes, and her hands were always red and she would rub her knees as she sat with me and talk about the boys she was seeing. There were no young men left in England, only old crocks from the War, she used to say, and laugh. And she told me once that even a one-legged man could have a lot of lead in his pencil, and if she met one with a fat pocket-book she would be a maid no more. Not that she had been a maid for a long time. And she would nudge me and wink as she said this. She had a lovely throaty laugh, and I always liked to laugh with her, even when I could not quite understand what she was on about.
    So it was all rather jolly back then, with me and Pie and Pa, as I was still allowed to call him, and Mrs Bramley and Elsie always coming and going, and the house seemed less dark and empty, and there were fires lit in every room in the winter, not like now, when they are only in the study and the front room, and I creep from pool to pool of lamplight with the cold shadows in between.
    It seems that some of father’s investments didn’t work out, or else the Turks took them, or perhaps they just got lost down the back of a drawer or something, because all of a sudden, Mrs Bramley and Elsie were let go , and they both kissed me the day they left, and bobbed to father, who was very stern and cold, but I could tell he was upset too. And Elsie cried, her nose as red as her hands. And the door closed on them, and Pa and I were alone.
     
     
    T HAT SEEMS A long time ago now, and Pie and I are quite used to the silence and the shadows. We sit and read E. Nesbit, or Charles Kingsley, or Daniel Defoe (I love Robinson Crusoe – how splendid it would be to have an entire island to oneself!) And we explore the canal, and Port Meadow, and Binsey, and sometimes when father is in London I walk all the way to Cowley village and back, just so I can cross and recross Magdalen Bridge, and stare up at the beautiful tower. There are so many beautiful places in Oxford. If only the weather were better! And I like seeing the students in their silly mortar-boards and flapping gowns, and the dome of the Radcliffe Camera (how can a building be called a camera? – no-one has ever explained), and the Bodleian, where they have all the books in the world.
    But most of the time, in winter at least, Pie and I stay close to home. Father does not like me wandering around Oxford anymore,