ABSTRACT
By dint of much tramping about and haggling, he found the first of his many married quarters: ‘Melcombe’ in Elmhurst Road, was among the better ones: the landlady fed him well and, until Rosalinde arrived, popped a hot water bottle into his bed every night. In return, he entertained the landlady and her family by playing whatever tunes they liked on their piano. His chief task at Reading was to learn about aeroengines: not easy, given his ignorance of all things mechanical, but he already knew plenty about map-reading, meteorology and photography, so this was a positive pleasure. His notebooks, full of accurate and neatly drawn diagrams, reveal a growing understanding of how engines work.2
