What else did I bring? The photo album of my childhood and youth and also of that little bit of postwar time when the four of us, Peter and Célia and James and I, were still together in Egypt. Célia didn’t want this album and I had rejected it as too bulky, but Maman silently squashed it into my suitcase. I also brought a silver casket my father gave me, made in Lebanon I think, a gift from his great-grandfather to his grandfather. And a miniature cedarwood chest, also from Lebanon, which I enveloped for safekeeping in an old piece of wrapping paper from Hannaux, the department store where I had bought the dreadful cloche I ended up wearing for the wedding. I used this wrapping paper as a liner for the kitchen drawer where we kept keys and bicycle lamps and so on. During those first long bewildering weeks at Alver Shore, when by the evening I was in such a daze I hardly knew my own name, I used to open the drawer and put my hand on the paper and touch the name and address of the store that was stamped, in French and Arabic, in slightly blurred sage ink on a putty background. Just to steady myself. When we moved from Alver Shore to Fulbrook I laid the paper out again in the next kitchen drawer, the one downstairs. Very soon the past got rubbed away, so that when I put my hand in for a torch battery or a dog lead or the old tin opener because I couldn’t find the new one, I didn’t touch my memories anymore. Maybe the word—Alexandrie—darted through my subconscious, a gleam too quick for me to catch but I carried on in my real life, fetching in coal or walking the dog or making spaghetti Bolognese. And so it’s been ever since. Until now, of course, when I’m remembering, remembering everything.

We stayed with James’s parents, Iris and Findlay, in August 1945. It was lovely to meet Iris after our letters. I had imagined a great imposing woman, I don’t know why, but she was nearly as short as me. She had dark gray wavy hair, and wavy worry lines on her forehead too, that deepened when she spoke to you. But that was only because she took you seriously. By September James had been offered a curacy—a place on the Hampshire coast called Alver Shore.

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