When Simon Barton married Joanna Grenville he was very much in love with her. His friends made sarcastic remarks about the marriage. They said he was selling out, that he was more interested in the big house and the money than the girl, but none of that was true. Not then. When they met he was a post-graduate student researching the breeding habits of merlins in the hills. It was 1975 and they were both twenty-one. He was serious, rather academic. The work at university had not come easily to him and he had realised from the beginning that if he were to get a good degree he would have to miss out on the round of parties and concerts which seemed so important to his friends. He was also a virgin.

When he met Joanna she was not living at the Cadver, but in Monk’s Wood, a house further up the valley that had been left to one of her friends by an aunt. Monk’s Wood had been her second home since she had left school, and Alex, the owner, had been her best friend since she was a toddler. When Simon was introduced to the place Alex was running it like a commune. There were usually at least six adults there. Some, like Joanna, were more or less regulars, others stayed for just a couple of weeks at a time. They were students pretending to be artists or musicians. Joanna had just left art school, though Alex was older than the rest and had children. The set-up seemed quite exotic to Simon and different from anything he had ever known.

He had met the group one night in a pub – it was spring and he was camping in the fells so that he could spend as much daylight as possible looking for merlin nests. They had been sitting in the garden in the dark, the children wrapped up in blankets and asleep. One of the regulars in the bar had called them ‘bloody hippies’, and because he, too, felt an outsider he had gone to join them. For some reason they had adopted him. They admired his work immensely, they said.

Of course the whole group was committed to the environment. They invited him to Monk’s Wood for meals and when they found out he was camping said of course he must stay. They had room after all and it would be good to have someone explain the important issues. They told him proudly that they were all Friends of the Earth.