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The market sold everything one could imagine wanting, and some unimagined. When we stood at the edge of town the distant mountains seemed to be the land and the hundreds of miles of country
before them like an ocean. I loved it there. We stayed six weeks, and when we left, we were accompanied to the station by the Spanish proprietor and many of his staff. Kingsley had finished his
book, but I hadn’t finished mine.

While we’d been away, Sargy Mann had moved in to help Monkey look after the boys, and on our return, having cooked us a delicious dinner, he said he thought he ought to be leaving.
‘Don’t go,’ I said, so he didn’t. In fact he lived with us for about eight years more, until he married.

Before we’d left on this journey, I’d searched for and found a crammer in Brighton, whose tutor struck me as right for Martin. The crammer in London had been a total failure: neither
of the boys had learned much and had truanted for a good part of the terms there. I explained to Mr Ardagh at Sussex Tutors in Brighton that Martin was almost totally uneducated but none the less
extremely bright and, if decently taught, was scholarship material for university. I added that he wasn’t my son and therefore he had to believe I wasn’t saying this out of maternal
blindness.

Mart went to see him, and agreed to go. In that one year he shot ahead, and while we were in America the news came that he’d got a scholarship for St John’s, Oxford. I felt as
pleased as if I
had
been his mother, and Kingsley was delighted. We had tried sending Philip to another tutor elsewhere, but he left after a few hours. Eventually he went to Camberwell
School of Art where Sargy was now teaching.

The short lease on Maida Vale was beginning to worry me. The
house belonged to the Eyre Estate, but when I asked them whether we’d be able to renew, they wouldn’t
agree. They said they didn’t know what they were going to do with the property – it might be sold for redevelopment. In short they’d guarantee us nothing. Kingsley thought it
might be good to live somewhere in the country, so we looked at various houses, none of which appealed to us.

Then I saw an advertisement in
Country Life
for a house on Hadley Common, outside Barnet, that was up for auction. Colin, Sargy and Martin came with us to look at it. It was a
late-Georgian house facing the common on one side, and at its back had a large sloping garden with magnificent cedar woods and a meadow – nearly nine acres in all. There was a cottage, a
derelict barn, garages and an enclosed sunny courtyard. There were eight bedrooms, three reception rooms and various offices. We looked at it, and went home for a family conference. Everybody was
mad about it, including me, but I realized we couldn’t afford more than token help, and it would take a great deal of work to run. I said this: the rest of the family looked at me pityingly
– what a spoilsport. They’d all help and we must try to buy it. After a satisfactory survey, I rang our accountants and told them, also asking how much we could afford to bid for it.
They said it sounded a cinch; they’d arrange a mortgage, and I might bid up to £57,000 in the auction. I decided that our best hope of getting the house at as low a price as possible
was to employ an extremely experienced bidder, and we went to Humbert & Flint. I couldn’t face going to the auction and we stayed at the end of the telephone, and duly received a call
from our man saying he’d waited through early bidding, then made one bid and got the house for £48,000. Overjoyed, I rang our accountant. He replied that he was afraid the mortgage had
fallen through, and he was off on holiday. We had bid, paid 10 per cent of the price, and in three weeks were bound to produce the balance.

I don’t think any of the family realized how serious the situation had become. Kingsley’s attitude to any family or financial crisis was
to go on writing and take
no notice. I rang our publisher, Tom Maschler, and it was through him that I met Anton Felton. He appeared that evening at Maida Vale and listened quietly to me while we ate vegetable soup in the
kitchen. ‘You
are
in a mess.’

‘I know. I feel so angry with our accountants I want to sue them.’

‘You could, but I shouldn’t. Leave it to me and I’ll see what I can do.’

Anton was also an accountant. He specialized in clients who were writers, and this was the beginning of a long and affectionate association with him as an accountant and a friend that has lasted
until the present day. He found us a mortgage and from then on took over our affairs until he retired some fifteen years later.

The house needed rewiring, among much else, and Monkey undertook this with Martin as his assistant.

We moved in on 28 November 1968 to the usual confusion of bare boards, the hunt for a kettle and mugs and bedding among the daunting array of tea chests, and an abusive call
from the new owner of Maida Vale saying how disgustingly dirty we’d left the house. When I said I’d had it especially cleaned after we left, she retorted there were marks on the walls
where pictures had been – even in the kitchen. ‘Perhaps she just doesn’t go in for pictures,’ Monkey said.

As we fell into bed that first night, Kingsley reminded me that we were due at the Bruces next day for a Thanksgiving lunch. David Bruce was the US ambassador then, and Evangeline was a
wonderful hostess who gave enormous parties. But we had to dress up for them. I hadn’t unpacked any clothes because there was nowhere clean to put them, and anyway I was longing to get the
house workably straight. But Kingsley really wanted to go and so, of course we went.

The house had been called Gladsmuir, but we hated this name and I found among early papers that it had once been called Lemmons – presumably it had once been a farm owned by someone of
that name. So we reverted to Lemmons. We were to live there for the next eight years.

Lemmons was a large enterprise that very nearly succeeded. When we arrived, we were extremely short of help and the house needed a lot doing to it, and I, responsible for the family finances,
was in a state of chronic anxiety about them. Writers don’t get paid
a regular wage. They have little or no idea what they will earn from one year to the next, but the
basic expenses of a large house and jungloid garden are always there.

The help that had been promised by the family amounted to some lawn-mowing and occasional help with unpacking the enormous cheap bulk shopping that I did from time to time. I told them all at
the outset that I couldn’t iron, an arrant lie that was received calmly without criticism, but I found myself doing everything else.

I remember feeling constantly tired during those eight years; I used to fall asleep sitting upright in an armchair after dinner. However carefully I made lists and planned things, however hard I
worked, I never caught up. Kingsley being unable to drive, and having absolutely nothing to do with our finances, meant I was a part-time secretary and chauffeur, as well as getting in food,
cooking it and clearing it up.

Kingsley liked to have people to stay at weekends; the boys brought their girls and other friends so there would quite often be twelve or more round the table. After about two years my mother,
no longer able to deal with living alone, came to live with us. Kingsley was very nice about this when I asked him, and even wrote her a letter saying how glad he was that she was coming, which
pleased her enormously. I had a bathroom made adjoining a ground-floor bedroom that looked on to the courtyard.

We acquired a wonderful help in this house. To begin with, whenever we went away, whatever help we had defaulted, packed up, and disappeared on the day after they’d been paid. On one such
occasion, Monkey found an ad in the local paper and answered it. Lilly Uniacke arrived. My brother had never interviewed anyone in his life, and his opening gambit wasn’t promising:
‘Mrs Uniacke, I hope you’re not an old slag, because we’ve had enough of them.’ She burst out laughing and assured him that she wasn’t.

She was wonderful in every way, and particularly good with my mother who was becoming frail and needed more attention than I
had time to give her. She moved into the cottage
in the courtyard. We also found a very genteel person who ironed shirts twice a week, and a very nice gardener called Mr Mayhew, who came for three hours a week. Having this amazing garden,
derelict when we arrived but showing signs of good Edwardian planting, rekindled my pleasure in gardening, and I made an old-fashioned rose garden, planted a number of trees and shrubs, and
resuscitated the long south-east herbaceous border.

Gardening became a secret vice for me, a vice because I always felt guilty when I indulged in it, knowing that there were many other things I ought to be doing. It was increasingly difficult to
find any time to write, and after I’d struggled through
Odd Girl Out
I found myself blocked. I was writing a piece each month for
Brides
magazine, working for Drusilla Beyfus
who was a friend, but any serious writing seemed beyond me. I’d lost confidence as many of us do during the course of our writing lives. This had nothing directly to do with Kingsley, who was
always attentive, honourably critical and encouraging. But indirectly it
did
have something to do with him. He’d joined both my agents and my publishers, whereupon I felt I had drifted
into a position of second fiddle with both. My dear Peter Peters died very shortly after his eightieth birthday party, and in him I lost the only professional associate who really believed in
me.

These feelings didn’t break upon me suddenly, they seeped imperceptibly into my consciousness through a number of small things. For instance, we used to stay with a couple who’d been
friends of mine and whenever we arrived there would be a small pile of books and articles Kingsley had written that our host wanted him to sign. But never, during the eighteen years I was with
Kingsley, did he refer to the fact that I was also a writer. I concluded, of course, that this was because he thought nothing of me. There were a number of things like that that neither conferred
nor even sustained confidence.

Eventually, I began trying to write short stories because as a medium they seemed suited to my lack of time and it wouldn’t be
such a big deal if I failed. But living,
at times, with five men, and one woman who didn’t much like me, left me feeling isolated. An aspect of feeling isolated is that one also feels responsible for it. Of course I was encouraged,
even expected to be responsible, but conversely nobody finds responsible people entertaining or desirable. Kingsley wanted someone to lean on, to run all the boring parts of his life, but he found
it difficult to like them. He’d been in love with me, and now he wasn’t. Or perhaps it would be truer to say that he was beginning not to be.

I had two people to whom I could – at least, to some extent – talk about my difficulties. The first was Anton, who by chance happened to have a house on Hadley Green round the corner
from us. He would come when I asked him. We’d go through whatever the current problems were about money or tax, and then he’d sit most patiently while I unloaded my anxieties or
grievances or difficulties about the boys or their sister, Sally, who was intermittently back with us. He was utterly discreet, tactful and realistically sensible, always clear about when some
particular problem could be solved, and when it couldn’t. We were spending a phenomenal amount of money on drink, and this was Kingsley’s sole responsibility in the household. He was
drinking fairly heavily, although never until he’d finished his work. But still he was fairly often very drunk in the evenings – the only times that we were indisputably alone together.
I didn’t talk to Anton about that, but I dimly recognized that it was eroding all intimacy and affection.

The other supportive friend I had then was Victor Stiebel. Victor had reached the stage in his illness where he couldn’t any longer go out. He was confined to his flat in Hyde Park
Gardens, except once or twice a year when he was driven down to Brighton to stay with Dick Addinsell, a theatre and film composer famous for ‘The Warsaw Concerto’ in the film
Dangerous Moonlight
. He used to have a friend to lunch practically every day, and I was asked about every three weeks.

The routine was always the same. I’d drive there to arrive
punctually at one o’clock; we’d have one drink, and then his enormous Austrian housekeeper would
produce our lunch, on two trays, usually consisting of poached fish followed by stewed apple and coffee. But visiting Victor was like going into the sun: he had an endless kindly curiosity about my
life and family, and I always felt, if I wanted to, that I could confide in him.

I do remember one particular occasion when I was saying how difficult it was catering at weekends, as I never knew whether either or both of the boys were coming and, if so, who or how many they
were bringing with them. He asked what Kingsley had to say about this.

‘He said,“Why don’t you simply cook enough food for twelve and stop bothering about it?”’

‘And do you do that?’

I looked at him and shrugged. ‘Sometimes.’

‘Darling Jane, you could simply leave them to get their own food if they don’t tell you when they’re coming. But you always want to do things in the most difficult way,
don’t you?’ It was so affectionately said that it really hit home. I realized that I saw these altercations as a challenge from which I had to emerge the hero. It was the first time I
looked at myself from the outside and saw how much I colluded in, even encouraged these situations.

Victor never complained of his condition. He read, he listened to music, he had long telephone chats with friends. We used to talk about books and music and sometimes mutual friends. He wrote a
book about his childhood in South Africa that occupied his attention and energy, and he was very excited when it was published. I look back now in some shame to think how much more I might have
encouraged him with this. Only twice did I get a glimpse of the confines and misery of his life. Once he was staying with Dick and he said, ‘You can’t imagine how wonderful it was to
see daffodils
growing
in the Park.’ More poignantly he said on another occasion, not looking at me, ‘Sometimes, at night, I
fall
out of bed and just have to stay there
until morning when Miss Brandt comes
in with my tea.’ I felt so paralysed, so appalled by this sudden vision of his helplessness with all the concomitant discomfort
– cold, stiffness and sheer bloody frustration – that I couldn’t speak. He gave me a quick look and changed the subject. Why did I not have the kindness to say something so that
he could speak of it further, as I now think he wanted to? I didn’t know then that it isn’t pity that people in such distress want, it’s understanding. It felt like a repetition
of my behaviour when my father died. I am still haunted by that lost opportunity.