3 January 1973

This is the letter I have written John. The postmark should read 12 November 1958, but instead it is being delivered, by hand, fourteen years late.

Dear John,

You’re upstairs sleeping now, as you have been since you asked me two nights ago about your Father. It’s not that I don’t want to tell you, rather that it is difficult for me and I’ve been putting it off. The problem is mine, not yours. I think it would be better if I wrote to you about what happened. And I’ll write to you as an adult because in so many ways that’s what you are.

I met your father, Dai Davies, when I was at university. I know you’ll find this hard to believe, but when I was young I was considered a prodigy. I could have gone to Cambridge or Oxford, but my parents said they were too far away and so I went to Bristol University when I was seventeen and got my degree in a year, which is very unusual. Then I did a Master’s. But to do that meant that I had to work really, really hard, all day and every evening so I didn’t have many friends and didn’t go out to parties or anything like that. And you have to remember that I was young younger than the students around me, so I must have been nervous, and they wouldn’t have wanted to know me, wouldn’t have wanted me around because I was so young. But I wasn’t lonely because I had my books, my studies. Or maybe I was lonely — I can’t really remember, but I don’t think so.

I lived with a widow called Mrs Protheroe, as a boarder. The war hadn’t been over for long and the world was a very different place from the one you know. Mrs Protheroe — Prothey, as I thought of her — was a timid woman who jumped at the slightest noise. Her husband was killed in the war and, looking back, I think she had a nervous breakdown. I had a small, sad breakfast with Prothey every morning. So many things were still hard to get, you had to exchange tickets for food so that everyone could have some and the rich didn’t get everything (as I say, the world was a very different place then). After breakfast I’d walk down Whiteladies Road to the Philosophy Department and stay there all day, even at weekends. When Td finished, I walked back to Prothey’s and we ate an evening meal together. She couldn’t cook but the food was terrible anyway. I lost more than a stone when I lived with her. We never really talked and Td read at the table as we ate. I think she was relieved that we didn’t talk.

So as you can see I didn’t do very much except study because that was what I knew how to do best. I got my Master’s degree when I was twenty, and that was when I thought maybe it was time to have some fun. My parents came up to Bristol to see me graduate and I still have a picture that they took of me, on the grass outside the Wills Building wearing my gown and mortar board. I’ve put it in with this.