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first disastrous job in the tax office at Ely and, in taking the job at the theatre, probably had some idea that I would like to be a playwright and that this would be good experience. It was certainly experience of a kind. Connor and Tom came together to one of the performances and we met. I had no intention of asking my parents for permission to marry—parental consent was then necessary if bride or groom were under twenty-one—but we married on 8th August 1941, five days after I came of age.
    I shan’t write about my marriage in this incomplete diary except to say that I have never found, or indeed looked for, anyone else with whom I have wanted to spend the rest of my life. I think of Connor with love and with grief for all he has missed: the grandchildren in whom he would have taken such joy, my success, which would have made the burden of mental illness easier to bear—as money always does—the journeys, the laughter, the small triumphs and the day-to-day living we haven’t shared. Tom Norman is one of only two friends now living who experienced with us those Cambridge days and, later, our move to London, the small one-bedroom flat we rented in Manchester Square which was later destroyed in the bombing, Connor’s life as a medical student. I don’t see him often enough. It is one of the penalties of fame and its concomitant over-busyness, and a matter for shame as well as regret, that our lives become ill-directed and we spend so little time with the people we love and most wish to be with.

SATURDAY, 9TH AUGUST
    Tom and Mary dropped me at Darsham station this morning to catch the train before themselves driving back to Winterborne Houghton in Dorset. The visit was a happy one for the three of us.
    Mary was anxious to see Somerleyton, so we drove there on Thursday. It is an extravagantly splendid example of early Victorian country-house architecture, built round a Tudor-Jacobean shell but retaining few of the original features of the old house. The particulars of sale prepared in 1861, when Sir Morton Peto was forced to sell the estate, described the Hall as “a specimen of the architecture of the Elizabethan period, transformed by the purist taste into a rich and noble example of Anglo-Italian, a rich, harmonious style pervades the whole building.” It is very much a family home, which I liked.
    We had lunch there in a small agreeable café, with a view of the gardens, and then went on to see the Church of St. Mary the Virgin at Blundeston, notable for its round thin tower constructed in about 988. Two women from the village appeared while we were there. They took pleasure in telling us about the church. I said how glad we were that it wasn’t shut, and one of them replied that the police had advised that it should be and that one of their previous vicars had, indeed, closed it for a time but the congregation had insisted that it remain open. She said: “Why should we let vandals close our church when Hitler couldn’t do it?”
    I love visiting country churches although, not being a motorist, the opportunity to do so is limited. Usually now there is someone from the village keeping watch and ready and willing to talk about the church and its history. The pride and the love shown are appealing. The custodians are seldom young and I wonder how long this close personal interest will continue.
    On Friday we drove south to Thorpeness, that extraordinary black and white mock-Tudor holiday village created between the wars, a bastion of middle-class respectability and conformity incongruously facing the bleak wind-scoured beach and the untameable North Sea. For me it is peopled with the ghosts of 1930s nursemaids and small children in their floppy-brimmed hats. A good place to set a detective story? Certainlyit provides an intriguing contrast between claustrophobic security and the contaminating disruption of violent crime, but the architecture is too uniform to stimulate the creative imagination. Then from