Introduction

 Relevant extracts from the manuscript.

                                   Introduction

My first memory, aged five, was of a large white house with green shutters and a big garden.   It had long creepy passages, enormous rooms pretty bare of furniture, and I always thought it was haunted.

My father at that time was working as an actor and film producer at Pine Wood studios.  He left early every morning; a chauffeur picked him up and dropped him back in the evening.  Most of my early childhood my mother was absent. She had met a diplomat on the train from Reading to London and went off to live with him in Paris. She stayed at the George V Hotel. 

I was sent to my first boarding school, Guildsborough Lodge, at the age of seven where I was very unhappy. Then I went to numerous other boarding schools including a convent in Paris.  The convent made Dothboys Hall from Jane Eyre seem luxurious. 

 At twenty one I married a public school boy and went to live in a large manor house in the new Forest. And I lived a rich, grand and spoilt life.   I had a part-time cook and two dailies, plus a gardener.  My husband organised everything and I had little idea of how anything practical worked. I didn’t pay the bills or call any workman who might be needed. Nor did I know how the other half lived.  

 But with all the material things anyone could want I wasn’t happy.  I had a fast car, jewellery and a mink coat, and I should have been happy but I wasn’t.  I read somewhere that Princess Diana said she had everything and nothing which I totally relate to, because without the one thing that I think brings happiness is being loved and having someone to love.  My husband was away in London most of the week and I felt lonely and unloved.  

When I made my getaway, in a somewhat frail state of health and mind, I faced not only the prospect of complete and unaccustomed solitude, but also, I had to learn about very basic tasks that up until then my husband had dealt with.

Living alone, though the prospect may be daunting, can be a state you learn to delight in. It needs self-discipline, imagination, a stock ofresources and, if possible, help from a few friends. The process of adjustment is full of unseen hazards, mysteries, disappointments and rewards: but it is negotiable. 

So after much thought and agonizing I decided in 1982 that I had 

to leave and start again on my own.  There had to be more to  life 

than this.   It was a very difficult decision as I had little or no money 

 but knew that we only have one life and mine had to be as good 

as I could make it.

 

And I left for Oxford.

 

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