She felt a huge weight of responsibility; sometimes the thought of it ground round in her head until she felt confused and half insane. There was no one in the world to whom she could turn; no kind, rich, sensible older person. She thought of the Garden relatives as melodramatic silly people who were worse than useless in a situation like this, and her mother’s relatives, though she loved their gentleness and humour, were poor and afraid, and she thought of her brothers as children. It’s all on me, she thought. I must do it all.

But the forces which had been gathering for more than twenty years were, naturally, too strong for her. Some months after she left London University, where she had taken a course in journalism, she got a post as editorial assistant in a newly established Canadian news agency, at a salary of three pounds a week; and believed that, at last, her plans could go forward. She put two pounds of her first week’s salary into the Post Office, and went about with her chin set very firmly, walking on air.

On the day that she had saved twenty pounds her mother died.

She had not believed that it could happen. Her mother had been like her own right hand or like the daylight itself; it was impossible to think of life without her. All meaning seemed to leave life, except when Sophia walked among the birch trees on Enbury Heath and their beauty comforted her. She was too stunned to mind much when Francis, much disturbed, wrote to tell her that Harry, who had left school some time before, had gone out on tour in a repertory company run by one of Aunt Maxine’s shady friends; Aunt Maxine had flattered him into believing that he would be a West End star, with his looks, in a year.

‘Father didn’t try to stop him going. He’s drinking a bottle of whisky a day,’ wrote Francis. ‘He seems very miserable; I think he misses Mother.’

And the pressure of unceasing grief, of having no adored little mother to work for and rescue, of being utterly alone and feeling ill and strange, and knowing that her father was drinking himself to death, wretched because she would not see him – the pressure of these things went on, grinding into Sophia’s spirit. She did not feel like a real person, but like a ghost who worked, walked in the woods, and cried silently, hopelessly for hours at night.

But one day Uncle Preston telephoned her at the office to tell her that her father was dead; and the pressure went away, at last.

Grief stayed, and the strange ghostlike feeling, but with her father’s death the last link with the terrible old life seemed to snap; and she felt clear and free.

Twenty-one years had ended; she was just twenty-one years old, and there was a new world in front of her, waiting to be entered and conquered.