Lady Clara would have known within a few days what I was doing. She said nothing. I think she knew, with her cunning common sense, that there was only so much I could bear to be without. If I had to live without the land, without travelling, and without the girl who had been my constant companion since the day I was born, I had to find things which would make me feel as if I touched earth somewhere. Sea, and sometimes Perry, were the only things in London which seemed real at all.

I was allowed out riding early every morning, provided I took a groom as a chaperone and did not gallop. When the clocks were striking seven we would trot through the streets which were busy even then. Down Davies Street, across Grosvenor Square which was dusty from the building work, and along Upper Brook Street to the park where the green leaves were looking dry and tired, and some of the bushes were yellowing at their edges. Sometimes the gate-keeper at the Grosvenor Gate lodge would be up, and tip his hat to me, more often only the groom and I were the only people in the park. There were ducks silent beside the still pond, there were great flocks of pigeons which wheeled around us. One morning I heard a low rushing creaky noise and looked up to see a pair of white swans circling the water and landing with a great green bow-wave of stagnant water cresting against their broad white breasts.

On Wideacre at this time of year I thought the berries would be very bright and ripe in the bushes. The nuts would be in thick clusters on the trees. In the London park there was fruiting and nutting going on, but it seemed more like a diversion. It hardly seemed a matter of hunger, of life or death. The squirrels in the trees and the ducks by the reservoir seemed like stuffed pets, not like live hungry animals.