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I left Pete and Edwardes Square in August. I can’t now remember an exact moment when this decision was taken, any more than I can remember what preparations I made for it. I must have done
some flat-hunting – I think Robert helped me. London was full of run-down or even derelict properties. After wild ideas, such as Tower Bridge itself or Floral Street in Covent Garden (on
Shelley’s principle of living in a street with a name he liked), I found a maisonette in Blandford Street off Baker Street above a grocery and poultry shop. It was eighteenth century, had one
medium and one small room on each floor and a plaque outside it
that said, ‘Michael Faraday, Man of Science, was Apprenticed Here’. The rent was one hundred and
fifty pounds a year and clearly I’d have to share it. At some point during my marriage, my father had settled some family shares for me that brought in just over a hundred pounds a year. Even
I, pretty unclear about what life actually cost, could see that there was going to be a gap. I’d have to get some sort of job, and soon.

Blandford Street was in a poor state: I had to pay for some plumbing, a boiler, a very small bath that would just fit into the narrow slip room that contained a lavatory and basin. The walls
were like sleepy pears – bulging, soft and crumbly. Whoever had lived there before me had left illiterate notes pinned to them: ‘Hole house roting’ or ‘Look out for
seeling’. I had to buy materials to plaster and paint the rooms, and it’s interesting, looking back on it, to remember who lent me the money for this.

Earlier that year, in the spring I think it was, Pete had needed a new secretary. Wayland said he thought he knew the right person. He brought her round, and we all went out to dinner. I
remember a very pretty girl, about my age, in a black velvet dress. Her name was Elizabeth Adams; Pete engaged her at once, and she was there when I left, in a taxi with two suitcases and ten
pounds. I’d asked my father if I could stay with him and Ursula until my flat was habitable – he’d taken a large house in West Hampstead, and he’d said yes. It was Liz who
rang half an hour after I’d arrived there, to see if I was all right. It was she who later lent me three hundred pounds to get the flat going, unsolicited, to pay back when and if I liked.
It’s lovely and consoling to have, among so many others of that time, a memory that engenders pure gratitude.

I didn’t get a very good reception at Ranulf Road. It quickly became clear to me that Ursula didn’t want me to be there, and this was made plain by all kinds of small, subtle
manoeuvres. I was put into a room that was really somebody else’s, which meant there was nowhere to put away clothes. The house was quite large, with a housekeeper on the top floor. It was
also clear that I was expected
to be in for as few meals as possible. This was simple during the daytime, as I spent most of it painting my flat, but evenings – when I
didn’t spend them with Robert – were sometimes tricky. I couldn’t afford to eat out, and sometimes resorted to a bun in my bedroom. My father was unaware of this and, indeed, when
they were in, I did eat with them, but he never asked me how I was managing for money, and I was determined not to broach the subject. In front of my father, Ursula was blandly amiable, but I left
the house to sleep in my flat long before it was really habitable. I remember my first night there, a bare bulb in the ceiling, wooden floors full of malignant nails, the odour of decay that seeped
through the wet paint smell and the unpleasant feeling that everything was dirty except my bedclothes. Above all, I felt alone, and the only thing I was sure of was that I wanted to write.

For the next few months and the beginning of winter, I struggled to equip the house with necessities. I bought a job lot of second-hand gas fires and a second-hand cooker called the New
Suburbia. I painted the house in furiously bright colours – brilliant yellow up the stairs, which I carpeted with coconut matting. The smell of decay receded, but odours from the North
Brothers’ shop – the plucked and singed birds in the basement – came into their own. As Christmas approached, the odour of bacon and burned feathers and the uneasy smell of what
was being taken out of the birds rose steadily up the stairs. Food was still rationed, even bread, and it was an exceptionally cold winter. I asked Jill Balcon if she would like to share the flat
with me – two rooms each and a shared kitchen and dining room on the top floor – but the squalor was too much for her.

I was rescued from doom by Robert and Ray, who’d found a young painter called Joanna Dowling, whose work we all admired, and she came to live on the first floor. Robert offered me a
part-time job typing for his Inland Waterways Association, which brought in two pounds ten shillings a week. Once, having dinner with him in a small local restaurant, somebody sent a card to my
table asking whether I’d like to model clothes for
Vogue
. This was a tremendous bonus. I got three guineas a day – the first of which was with Norman
Parkinson, or Parks, as he came to be known. The other new girl, Wenda Rogerson, was a beauty who became Parks’s wife. Occasionally, I was asked to read some poetry for radio. I lived from
hand to mouth. The most extravagant purchase I made was a small walnut davenport desk I bought second-hand at Heals for thirty pounds. I wrote four books at that desk – by hand, in those days
– and I have it still.

Sometimes Robert came to stay with me; sometimes we went at the weekend to Stanmore. Divorce proceedings began. I’d explained to Pete, and subsequently to his lawyers, that I didn’t
want any money from him, but it became clear that the lawyers didn’t believe me – thought, for some reason, that I was holding out in the hope of getting more. I got so upset by this
that I went to see Bill Kennet about it. He received me with great kindness, but when I told him what I’d come about he seemed very put out. ‘Is that
all
you came for?’ And
I realized that he must have thought I’d changed my mind and wanted to go back to Pete. I never saw him again. I felt sad about that.

I had known that the most difficult aspect of my leaving Pete was what would happen with Nicola. I’d been going to see her every week at Edwardes Square, and poor Nanny couldn’t
understand why she and Nic couldn’t come and live with me. I knew that Pete would pay her wages, but I couldn’t begin to have bought them food or provided any reasonable space or
comfort for them. I realize now I could have negotiated with Peter about this, but at the time it didn’t seem right. Looking back, this seems ill judged and certainly selfish, but I
couldn’t handle nursery life with what my own had become. When Edwardes Square came to an end, Nanny and Nicola went to live with a friend who had a child of the same age, and I went there
every week, miserably aware of how unsatisfactory this was and guilty. Besides the material difficulties, there were emotions I was too frightened and ashamed to
confront. I was
afraid I should never have had Nicola and that I didn’t love her enough. I was selfishly determined to be a writer at any cost, to put it first, and I knew that I had to do it alone.

Looking back, it seems strange to me that I knew nobody with whom I could have discussed this impartially. Robert and Ray, the IWA and their friends formed my chief society. None of them had
children and I see now it was clearly against Robert’s interests to have me with other responsibilities than himself. He wanted, as I slowly came to see, all my maternal feelings to be
centred on him. Ray poured love and attention into him, but that wasn’t enough: he wanted me to do the same. Over the next year or so, Ray and I formed a close friendship largely because of
this and our mutual work for the IWA. Robert and Tom Rolt, who had founded the organization with Robert, were a brilliant combination and managed between them what remained of England’s
waterways. At the time, immediately after the railways were nationalized, canals were considered redundant, useless for either trade or pleasure. In the past the railway companies had bought
hundreds of them, then neglected them to the point where they could apply for an Act of Abandonment. Of the four thousand miles of navigable canals at the beginning of the century, only two
thousand remained. In 1947, the railway companies owned 35 per cent of them. They were surprised when we told them this.

Robert dictated a huge quantity of letters with facts and statistics and persuasive reasoning without faltering or changing his mind. He could also speak fluently and well without notes. He was
good at collecting influential people to back the IWA, including MPs of all parties whom he persuaded to ask pertinent questions in the House of Commons. He ran the IWA on a shoestring with the
utmost assurance. Inside himself, he had an insatiable need for attention and a virtuosity in the ways of getting it. He was deeply depressed, in danger of going mad, he said, and in some way this
was true but, as so much with him, not entirely true. He’d learned to manipulate people close to him so that they’d always feel
protective and anxious and fall in
with what he wanted. He was paranoid about not being liked or understood or appreciated enough. He was endlessly demanding and, in short, such an exhausting person to live with that Ray and I were
thankful to share him.

One of the most exhausting aspects of all this was that life was chronically
serious
. We weren’t supposed to be either light-hearted or happy about anything much – with the
exception of performances in the theatre, cinema, concert hall or opera house. These were all things that Robert did enjoy, indeed they were his refuge from what he called the despairing reality of
life. He ran his small literary agency to augment his private income, and there Ray was his helpmeet. He also liked walking, was indefatigable and had detailed maps of most of England from which he
planned marathon walks. Later he went on canal trips with the Rolts. On the evenings when he didn’t go out, he would read to Ray or me until well after midnight, when he would require his
last meal. Ray had early taken to giving him breakfast in bed, but she had to get up – as did I – to start the day and I remember often having to type his letters hardly able to keep my
eyes open.

He didn’t like me to have friends outside his circle, but I introduced him to one or two people of whom he approved, James and Anthea Sutherland, friends of Wayland, and Jill Balcon, for
instance, but generally he sulked or was jealous of any life I had outside his orbit. However, with the IWA work which grew quickly in volume, my own writing, and any extra jobs that came my way, I
didn’t have much time. What I had I spent with Nicola, and visits to my embittered mother in her dark little house.

My relations with her were at an all-time low. My father had made the appalling error of telling her I’d thought she would prefer him to find her a house before he left her, and she was
understandably very angry at what she felt was my betrayal. Before I’d left Peter and when I told her I was going to do this, she asked why, and I’d said I wanted to be a writer and
couldn’t do it married to
him. Her retort had been, ‘What on earth makes you think that anyone would ever publish anything that
you
wrote?’ This had
profoundly depressed me, and drove another wedge between us. At the time I felt it wasn’t love for my father that had driven her to her endless recriminations but pride, and I was too young
to recognize the painful validity of pride.

She lived with Great-aunt May, to whom she was uniformly kind, and my younger brother Colin, who I think bore the brunt of her shock and rage. She adored him, but she preyed on his feelings and
his sense of pity and responsibility to a damaging degree. She was determined that he should have nothing to do with Ursula, which suited Ursula as she didn’t want my father’s attention
diverted from her own children. But it made an irrecoverable rift between Colin and our father. By now he was at Radley where he was very unhappy. It was some years before I realized what a hard
time he was having; in those days I hardly ever saw him alone and we shared no confidences. I moved into Blandford Street in the autumn of 1947, and spent the next three years trying to come to
terms with my new life.

I was chronically short of money, as was my flatmate Joanna, who was trying to get work as an illustrator. Food seemed to go on being rationed for ever: we lived on coffee and
toast, kippers and unnamed frozen fish and cheap cuts of what meat we were allowed. I remember going to dinner one evening at my father’s house, being given two martinis and passing out
because I hadn’t eaten anything that day. Hating the idea that they’d think me drunk, I told them this, whereupon Ursula remarked that I should live on cheap food. I’d thought
that her hostility to me was largely based on her own insecurity, but she had now married my father, and I had to recognize that she simply didn’t like me. My father frequently said we were
his two favourite women, which made the situation worse. I came to approach her with caution. Now, I’d probably confront her, have it out somehow, but then I didn’t feel up to a
scene.

Joanna and I lived fairly separate lives, but we got on well with each other. She had a predilection for French counts with whom she spent many tense and often tear-stained evenings. There
seemed to be a lot of love about that was either unrequited or hopeless, and we discussed the difficulties of life and our relationships with amiable despair. Although I’d no money, I still
possessed a set of fairly decent clothes, but Robert didn’t like most of them. He wanted me to wear straight black skirts and shirts with ties. I’d cut my hair very short because it was
easier to keep, and found a wonderful Swiss hairdresser in St James’s Street who cut it every
three weeks for three shillings. I also came upon a Polish dressmaker, Mrs
Grodzicka, who made me skirts that fitted beautifully for three guineas.

On days when I didn’t go to the IWA office in Gower Street, I struggled on with my novel. It took a long time to write, largely, I think, because I didn’t know how to end it, but
eventually it reached a rather improbable conclusion. I paid somebody to type it and Robert and Ray sent it to Jonathan Cape. They were in two minds about whether it should go to Cape or Macmillan,
but the editor they knew at the latter was away, so it went to Cape. It was accepted three weeks later, to my surprise and joy, and I was invited to lunch with Mr Cape at a flat he had round the
corner from his publishing house in Bedford Square. It was a rather dark and dingy mansion flat; he was standing in front of an oak fireplace in the dining room when I met him. ‘I’ve
made rather a strong martini,’ he said, ‘very good for ladies who are menstruating.’ This wasn’t a very cheering start, but I reflected that he had my future in his hands,
so I smiled and pretended he’d said something entirely different.