This did not happen overnight, as the envious (and they are many) now assume. They were hard times, the early sixties. While the press invented swinging London and Carnaby Street, Kate sat in her basement feeding babies, trying to write saleable items, helping out by a cottage-industry job of assembling tin-openers at ten bob a hundred. (The kitchen in those days was full of heaps of strange metal objects, drying nappies, buckets full of soaking nappies, jars of turpentine, sacks of potatoes. They lived on potatoes.) More than once the bailiffs called to remove the furniture, but Kate sat it out, and wrote articles about the bailiffs. Stuart could have let her go back to work, had he agreed to look after the babies, but he wouldn’t, although he was very nice to them when he was around. A useful spirit of bitterness and self-reliance grew and hardened in Kate, and an absorbing interest in money. Pride and avarice. By the time the youngest of the three children started primary school, Kate had ceased to care what Stuart thought about her working. He had forfeited the right to care. Back she went, as soon as she could, to a regular job and a salary, to the double life of a working woman, to the overactivity to which she now claimed to be addicted.

Their marriage, eroded at the start by poverty, was finished off by her success. Stuart had an affair with an art student called, of all things (Kate’s phrase), Amaryllis, and a prolonged period of acrimony set in, ending in separation and divorce. Kate was so used to running the show single-handed that his departure was a relief. She bought a house just before prices began their astonishing rise, borrowing the deposit from a friend and paying back with conscientious regularity. Stuart continued to visit, but on her terms. At times she would look at Stuart and think, God, what have I done to this man, whatever has happened to us? but most of the time she was too busy for these reflections, and too intent on her own survival, and the survival of the children.