What we did, in fact, to make the best of it together, was go public. We plunged into the life of the village. Camilla became a parish councillor again. I joined the cricket team. Camilla ran raffles and organized sponsored walks to raise money for the local primary school. I learned the words of her favourite pub songs. We became thoroughly conscientious about our responsibilities to the place we lived in, even going so far as to stop smiling at the officers of the National Trust when they waved their sticks at us from across the river. And finally – I can’t find any better illustration of our state of mind than this – we traded in Camilla’s old MG for a Ford Cortina Estate.

It is always a sad, symbolic gesture in the life of a couple, the transfer from a two to a four or more seat vehicle; it marks the end of bilateral self-sufficiency. I ought, I suppose, to have been pleased. But paradoxically it upset me. I hated seeing the MG go. I had spent the night in it on more than one occasion. And it represented the independent, racy side of Camilla’s nature; the thing I’d loved her for.

I didn’t like it either – again paradoxically – when Camilla proposed, in our second year of marriage, that we no longer enter the Camelton Carnival in tandem. In the past we had dressed and made each other up meticulously for this event, but this year Camilla accompanied Max Loveday in the Comic Tradesman’s category, and came second; whereas I was reduced to joining Harry Vilbert and Lionel Turnbull amongst others in a Walking Historical Tableau for Nine People. We did And Shall Trelawney Die? but so did everybody else, and we won nothing.

I mention this only to be scrupulously fair to Camilla. I don’t want it to appear that she was hanging on to my arm, waiting for me to determine her fate.

This was a positive time for us materially, though. I plugged the holes in the walls of our cottage and Camilla agreed to think about having a damp-course. We effected major changes to Camilla’s school, improving the kitchens and extending its cultural activities to take in guided coach trips (I became the guide) to other literary landmarks near by, such as Westward Ho! and Jamaica Inn, Nether Stowey, Doone Valley, and Lyme Regis, where the Cobb still meant Louisa Musgrove and Jane Austen to me, not Sarah Woodruff and John Fowles. And no matter how much we prospered we were careful not to lose touch with the eager life of the intellect and spirit also, speeding up to London in the Cortina as often as we could, balancing our duties to the Alternative Centre for Thomas Hardy Studies on the one hand, with our obligations to keep up with what was happening in the British theatre on the other.