ABSTRACT
Our homecoming from East Africa in the early September of 1950 was not an easy one. The three days of comfortable roomy travel by flying boat from Port Bell to Southampton, with leisurely overnight stops at Alexandria and Augusta in Sicily, should have made a delightful transition from one lifestyle to another. But Caroline had to do it with a temperature of 102, and on arrival she had to go straight to the Hospital for Tropical Diseases, where she stayed for nearly a month. Our much longed-for reunion with our daughter Sarah had to be postponed until the middle of October. Never had the English climate seemed more depressing than in that rain-sodden autumn and winter of 1950–51. And for the first time in our married life we felt desperately poor. The Labour government, now in its sixth year of office, had still not succeeded in liberating the economy from wartime controls. Prices had risen during our absence. Our income had stood still. Caroline was a long time in recovering her health and strength, and she needed more domestic help than we could afford. I think it was at this time more than any other in our thirty-six years of marriage that the difference in our ages asserted itself. I was twenty-eight and still at the bottom of the professional ladder. She was forty-one and beginning to need some of the comforts of life. I do not doubt that all this contributed to her strong feeling that our family should not be enlarged.
