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Thorpeness to Aldeburgh, where we ate a picnic lunch at one of the wooden tables with benches outside the Moot Hall. It was warm and sunny, as it was for the whole of the visit.
    One of the delights of being with Tom and Mary is their knowledge of natural history. There isn’t a bird, butterfly, flower or tree which they can’t name. They spend much time travelling, often in some discomfort, in remote areas of Asia, searching for and photographing rare orchids. One, which Tom was the first to discover and describe, is named after him. At Covehithe we saw a butterfly that Tom said was called the Holly Blue and which he recognized as female because of the darker hue round its wings. It lives for just three days, and I wondered whether ours were the only human eyes that had actually seen it during that brief span. As Tom and Mary moved through the gate leading to the abbey ruin, the butterfly fluttered to a leaf close to me and rested motionless. It was one of those rare moments in which a fugitive beauty, briefly contemplated, untouchable, is experienced with a peculiar intensity, the sense of being a privileged spectator of a life which, however brief, is part of a mysterious whole.

MONDAY, 11TH AUGUST
    I’m back again in London. Last night was swelteringly hot and I awoke this morning to find myself lying in a pool of sweat. The house is again being underpinned and the mess outside is appalling. The two young men on the job, who seem to work cheerfully in this awful heat, have dug deep holes at the front, side and back. Despite my offer of unlimited tea, surely necessary in this heat, they won’t come into the house—I imagine because the firm have a policy that they never do—but bring their own drinks with them. The house today looks particularly depressing and dilapidated. The cracks seem to have widened during the last few days as if the house has resigned itself to decrepitude. I shall have to wait several months after the underpinning is finished before any repairsand redecoration can be carried out. I long to see it restored to what it once was.
    I had lunch with Frances Fyfield at the Belvedere in Holland Park. It is always good to see Frances, whom I admire as a crime writer and value as a friend. Arriving early, I spent some time quietly walking round what must be one of London’s loveliest parks. I have been fortunate all my life to live only in beautiful and historic places, first Oxford, then Ludlow, then Cambridge, and finally London. I can’t remember when my parents moved from Oxford to Ludlow, but it was certainly before I went to school. I don’t think young children respond to natural beauty; people are more important than flowers and trees; but to live in Ludlow from the age of four to eleven meant that my eyes saw little of the world outside home which was without beauty, and this constant exposure to the delights of one of England’s loveliest towns must surely have left its legacy.
    Looking back on my early schooldays, they seem closer to the Victorian age than they do to the life of a primary school child today, and indeed they were closer, in time as well as in attitudes to teaching. I was taken to my first school, which I must have attended from the age of five, not by my mother, but by a boy little older than myself who lived nearby. My memory is of being lugged along at a furious pace by this reluctant but not unkind attendant. The schoolroom was large and square with a huge coal fire burning in winter, the fire surrounded by a high fire-guard. It was a room which came alive in memory when I read an account of the schoolroom at Lowood in
Jane Eyre
, although I am sure the two establishments had absolutely nothing else in common. There were no inside lavatories and I can distinctly recall the day in which I was sitting on one of the wooden seats in the outside shed when part of the plaster ceiling fell on my head. I was temporarily stunned by surprise—although certainly not hurt, since