I tried this out, for fun, long after Sharon had given me the idea, on the retired annalists and archivists and on the wistful wives of bank managers and on the sundry spinsters of both sexes and on the visiting American post-graduates and the ordinary straightforward bad-tempered readers for pleasure who comprised, that year, Camilla’s largest summer school intake ever. It was my contribution to Camilla’s contribution to the festivities marking the centenary of the publication of A Pair of Blue Eyes, that early Hardy novel whose action, as everybody knows, takes place down here in the environs of Castle Boterel – scene also of Camilla’s exile and latterly of mine. Just a little to the west of here, through dripping meadows, lies Endlestow, where Stephen Smith met and fell in love with Elfride Swancourt and made the mistake of telling her about his esteemed friend Henry Knight; and further on up the coast is the Cliff Without A Name to which Knight himself clung an unconscionable time, eyeball to eyeball with evolution, waiting for Miss Swancourt to tear her petticoats and save him. Windy Beak is hereabouts also, as is Dundagel and Parret Down and Camelton. And they were all alive this summer with allusion-crazy pilgrims. Not a seal flopped lazily in Targan Bay but a dozen cameras fitted the picture to the words.

It was a busy time for Camilla. Her school became the obvious focus for the celebrations, the base and meeting place and nerve centre. She arranged lectures and seminars and expeditions. She collected distinguished visitors from remote railway stations. She found beds and laid on guides and packed lunches. They even looked to her to organise the competition to find the bluest pair of eyes in Cornwall – won, incidentally, by a near-sighted clay worker from St Austell, much to the chagrin of the holidaying Germans, all of whom had entered and all of whose eyes, in truth, were bluer.

‘You’re going to have to help,’ Camilla had warned me. ‘You’re going to have to take over some of my classes. But it shouldn’t be too awful for you – they’re nearly all women.’

‘What do you want me to tell them?’

‘Oh, anything. Just don’t treat them badly.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘They’re your bread and butter.’

She flashed me one of her fiercest looks, the kind that could split an oak. ‘They’re your bread and butter too,’ she corrected me.