Their relationship began at a time when far greater dangers than lesbianism were looming on the horizon. The two women, like many anti-fascists of the period, joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1935. During the Spanish Civil War they joined a Red Cross unit and were active in the 1937 International Association of Writers for the Defence of Culture. Warner’s political commitment found its expression for a while in an active involvement in Communist activities and in general anti-fascist work. We can also see the effect of her unfailing adherence to her father’s passion for history, in her case with an unwavering commitment to historical materialism as she explores, with an unfailing precision of vision, how we come to be who we are through the forces of society, class, and history. At the same time, her stories often revolve around the question of how a person might escape from these constraints rather than be defined by them.

Its return was more sobering than its departure had been. It had gone because they had willed it to do so. It came back of its own will. The Court Poet in his Welcoming Ode compared it to bees, cats, pigeons, and other animals with homing instincts, but it was felt that he was using too much poetic licence. There were stories from the Kingdom of Thule of individualistic underground springs which burst into towering activity and deluged everybody with hot water and cinders. Though nothing of that sort had ever happened in Wales, neither had a disappearing and reappearing mountain. But Mynnydd Prescelly embraced its inhabitants as quietly as ever, and sheltered them as reliably from the north wind, and bumblebees hummed up and down its slopes, and harebells grew where they always did. Presently the more light-minded and scientific fairies began to experiment in removal by Faith—not the mountain, of course, but rocks and stones which nobody needed—and when there was a small landslide, nothing would content them but another singing assembly. Again the mountain disappeared—this time in a heavy sea fog; and again it came back, looking, as one might say, unmoved. Before five centuries had passed, moving the mountain had become a regular ceremonial, carried out because the mountain would expect it. By then, research had established what happened. Mynnydd Prescelly rose up in the shape of a cloud, and travelled to Plynlimon for the inside of a week, the cloudy Mynnydd Prescelly would travel back, fall as rain, solidify as mountain. And human beings who had noticed its absence from the skyline would say, ‘There’s Mynnydd Prescelly again, so we’ll start harvesting.’