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Life in that enclosed world continued; nothing impinged that happened outside it. Nobody ever talked about the war: Eileen set the tone here. She was a member of the Peace Pledge Union and if
she mentioned the war it was with vague distaste. My only contact with it was the letters from Pete, full of guns and terrible weather and naval life. I used to rush through them looking for the
affectionate bits about his feelings for me before reading them fully and replying. My family hardly ever wrote, and when my mother did, occasionally, her letters were imbued with disapproval. Many
of the company’s parents came down to see their offspring when they were playing a lead, but mine didn’t.

My father came once, stayed the night in the local pub and gave me dinner there. He charmed Eileen and the girls thought he was marvellous. He came when it was a rehearsal
week, so he didn’t watch a play, but I was glad to see him. He asked me if I was happy, and I said I was. For once, I didn’t feel uneasy with him and he gave me news of home. Robin had
left Rugby and was working on the runway for an aerodrome, which seemed pretty dreary to me, but my father said it was good experience for him. Colin was at the Beacon. Grannia had been moved out
of London to a local nursing-home: she wasn’t quite herself. His visit came and went like a flash.

John Christie, of Glyndebourne fame, had a house near us and used to ask us, two at a time, to dinner with him. All I can remember was his kindly interest in each of us, and the serious dinner
with glasses of wine. It was meant to be a treat, and it was. The meal was particularly welcome: for weeks there had been a potato famine, which curtailed our evening meal, and we were hungrier
than ever.

At one point, Eileen thought she might produce my play,
Our Little Life
, the domestic comedy I’d written when I was fourteen, which was exciting for me, but she changed her mind and
it came to nothing. Instead, she gave me the lead in
Granite
, by Clemence Dane, a melodrama in four acts set on Lundy. It was my great chance, a huge part and the heroine not off the stage
for more than ten minutes. I was no good in it. My only achievement in this play was that it had a song with no music. I’d write that, I said, and Bertie, in deference to my grandfather,
allowed me to do so.

We took it to Ilfracombe, and after a matinée Paul Scofield and I were invited to have tea in the local hotel with Radclyffe Hall and Lady Troubridge. By now I knew – theoretically,
at least – about lesbians, so I very much looked forward to meeting some. Radclyffe Hall wore a severely tailored coat and skirt with shirt and tie, shingled black hair and pearl stud
earrings. Lady Troubridge wore the same outfit, except that her shirt was a blouse with a large droopy silk bow at the neck. ‘Don’t let Radclyffe Hall make a pass
at
you,’ my fellow actors had said, and I went determined not to invite any such thing. I needn’t have worried. They both had eyes only for Paul, and I was left contentedly to the scones
and strawberry jam.

Our most successful production was a triple bill of Coward’s
Tonight at Eight Thirty
plays –
Fumed Oak
,
Red Peppers
and
Still Life
. Paul was brilliant in
all three plays, Joan Heal was his fellow red pepper and taught him some tap dancing for the music hall act of the fading and quarrelsome stars, and I played Laura opposite Paul in
Still
Life
, later made into the film
Brief Encounter
with Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard.

Joan Heal became ill; as with my illness, nobody took much notice. I remember lying in the garden with Mavis, Joan’s bedmate, and asking idly how Joan was. ‘She doesn’t seem to
get much better,’ Mavis said. A warning bell rang in my mind, and I knew suddenly I must do something about her.

She was lying in bed, very restless with a high fever. There was, of course, no such a thing as a thermometer in the house, but touching her burning forehead was enough to know that. She said
she was terribly thirsty, but her throat hurt too much to swallow. I said I’d go to Eileen and she would get a doctor. But here I met with unexpected and total resistance. Nonsense, there was
no need for that. She probably had a mild attack of flu. If she stayed in bed for a few days and kept warm she would pick up in no time. I looked after Joan for the next few days; changing her
sheets – I remembered how much I’d wanted someone to do that for me – giving her aspirin, and trying to encourage her to drink. She got worse. Her throat, when I looked at it, was
covered with a yellow crust. I went again to Eileen, who sulkily agreed to ring a doctor. He came, a shadowy old man, a locum who surveyed her from afar, and prescribed aspirin and hot drinks. I
bought a thermometer in Bideford. Joan’s temperature was veering between 103º and 104ºF. I told Eileen I didn’t think the doctor was much good and that Joan’s parents
should be told how ill she was. Eileen blew up: ‘You
really must learn not to interfere in other people’s lives’. She was rattled and very angry with me for
confronting her. Was she going to telephone Joan’s parents? She would do so when and if she saw fit.

I got their telephone number from Joan and went to the local pub to call. They came at once, another doctor was called, Joan proved to have diphtheria and was moved to a fever hospital. There
the poor girl remained in isolation for weeks. We were all tested for being a carrier, and Mavis turned out to be the culprit. None of us caught the disease, but Eileen never forgave me.

Some months later, Joan’s parents wrote to me, saying that she was home and recovering slowly, and thanking me for probably saving her life. By then, at Instow, it was almost open warfare
between Eileen and me.

Shortly after this, Eileen decided to split with Bertie and take some of the company to Cambridge where she proposed starting a company. I wasn’t asked to go with her and returned
home.

I didn’t get a very good reception. I later discovered that my mother considered that my time at Instow had had a very bad effect on my character. This was probably true:
we had pursued our own ends, oblivious to the war; we thought it sophisticated to say ‘fuck’, whether appropriate or not; we didn’t get up in the mornings unless we were going to
rehearse. At home there was no rehearsal. I was indolent, selfish, insular and frivolous. My mother told me I ought to join one of the services, but all I wanted was to get another acting job. I
was eighteen, with all the jagged inconsistencies of a late developer. The arts seemed to me the only thing that really mattered. I was bored by the endless talk about rationing, the preoccupation
with the nightly news. I continued doggedly to learn speeches from plays and practise them, once driving my arm through a window, which enraged my mother, who didn’t seem to understand that
this was simply a proof that my gesture had arisen from sincere work. I must have irritated her intensely but one of
the chief marks of adolescents is that apart from a capacity
for being hurt, they have little or no idea of their effect upon people.

When I wasn’t writing, or acting, or reading, I went for long rambles by myself, collecting blackberries and trugs full of the horse mushrooms that grew so plentifully in the fields round
us. I wrote long letters to Peter, and to Dosia, who was nursing in a hospital in the Midlands. Her first letter from there spoke of her first morning and being ordered to make a round of an
enormous ward of soldiers to ask them if their bowels had opened that day. Their responses turned her crimson, but she said she managed.

The pressure to join up continued from my parents. Behind my selfishness about this was the real fear of being sent to an institution that might be much like a boarding-school, only worse, and
the return of the paralysing homesickness, which I had by no means conquered. In hindsight, it’s odd to me that neither my parents nor I ever thought of my becoming a nurse, something I think
I should have been able to achieve.

Then an RAF friend of my father’s got married and he and his wife spent their honeymoon at the Beacon with us. His bride, Lesley Waring, had been an actress. Lesley was glamorous, charming
and funny, and I loved her on sight. It was through her that I got an offer to join the winter company of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon, which was run by Balliol Holloway,
an actor whom I’d seen in many Shakespeare plays and revered. Lesley’s ancient father lived in Stratford with a housekeeper. He’d been a pioneer in the theatre: the first man to
stage Ibsen in England. I was due to go to Stratford in September, but some time in August, Peter got a few days’ leave, and came down to Sussex for two nights.

By now our correspondence had become more intimate. Pete told me more about himself – how he’d had a long affair with a beautiful girl but didn’t want to marry her, about his
friends, John Winter and Michael Bratby, with whom he used to go sailing and wildfowling before the war, about his lighthouse on the Wash where he painted and collected. He reiterated that he
thought he was in
love with me but that, of course, I was far too young. When young, one doesn’t take kindly to being reminded of it; the general ambition is to be mature
– utterly grown-up and treated as an equal.

On the afternoon he arrived, we went for a long walk and eventually rested against some haycocks in a meadow and had a long talk about this. He kissed me and said he wanted to go to bed with me,
but that my age made this dangerous. I assured him that it wasn’t. I had no idea what was entailed and wasn’t prepared to tell him, as it would surely relegate me to the ranks of the
humiliatingly young. It was clear to me that I
ought
to know. I basked in his admiration and approval and I didn’t want to lose his interest, which so charmed me. Eventually, it was
agreed I should come to his bedroom that night.

Pete had been given my parents’ bedroom, and I had a little room at the extreme opposite end of the house. I can’t remember now where my mother was sleeping – other family and
friends were staying – but I do remember how every floorboard creaked, and how the danger of discovery added excitement to the adventure.

I returned to my own room in the early hours of the morning, and lay awake for some time. What had happened was surprising, but Pete had been very affectionate and gentle. It hadn’t hurt
very much and he’d repeatedly told me how lovely I was and how much he enjoyed it. Somehow I’d thought I’d enjoy it too, but nothing was said about that. This, I concluded was
because women – and surely now I was one – did it for love, and if you loved somebody, you must want to please them.

After a repetition of that night, Pete left; or, rather, we took him in my mother’s car to Lympne – a small aerodrome where he was to be picked up by a Stirling bomber to go on a
night raid over Germany. I knew this was a dangerous mission, but when I asked him if he’d been ordered to go he said, no, he’d volunteered because he was interested in camouflage and
also wanted to experience a bombing raid.

The airfield was so small that the commanding officer said he
doubted whether such a large aircraft would be able to land. I found myself praying that it couldn’t. But,
of course, it did, its nose pressed against the hedge at the end of the runway. Pete gave me a quick kiss and disappeared into it. We watched it make a circuit out to sea and fly east. It was then
I realized that Peter might be killed, if not on this raid then in his ship. People were being killed all the time.

We sat in the drawing room that evening listening to the news, which included the raid over Germany, and, for the first time, I felt love and fear congealing. Recent unconsidered thoughts and
images came to me – of the possibility that the Battle of Britain might have been lost; of the naval chaplain who, although rescued, insisted his place was with the crew trapped below or in
gun turrets and was returned to his sinking ship; and most of all, of Jean Gilbert who’d been staying with us when I first returned home. ‘Jean’s husband has been killed,’
my mother said. She was silent all day and wept every night, as her poor swollen face, with its haunted, red-rimmed eyes, made plain. These things happened – had been happening now for months
and months – and I’d been heartlessly unaware of and indifferent to them.

No longer. That night I prayed desperately for Pete’s safety. I must love him or surely I’d not feel this aching anxiety? He had become my lover – something I’d never
thought would happen to me – so it followed that I was now in love. When he rang the next day to say that he was back and on his way to his ship, and he loved me, I told him I felt the
same.

My family liked him – to some extent, I think, they were dazzled by his charm. Only my younger brother, Colin, of whom he’d drawn a fierce little portrait, didn’t seem to feel
the same, but of course, I thought, from my eleven years’ seniority, he was only a child.

In September 1940 I went to Stratford. It was a beautiful golden autumn. I took a taxi from the station to my digs, as I’d been told to bring any decent clothes I
possessed for a modern play. My digs were in a small terraced house in Mansell Street owned by an old stagehand, who lived there with his daughter, Dot. I had a small room on the first floor, which
was almost entirely filled by a large iron double bedstead. My rent was thirty shillings a week; my salary was six pounds a performance week, and three pounds on rehearsal weeks. The first play was
Shaw’s
The Doctor’s Dilemma
, with Margaretta Scott playing the lead. The other cast members were all incredibly old as a result of the war: the average age of the company was
seventy. I had the small part of Minnie Tinwell, who turns out to be the real Mrs Dubedat. Early rehearsals took place on the terrace overlooking the river.

Balliol Holloway was directing. I was excited and nervous and wasn’t much good as Minnie, but he was very kind to me. The first evening he took me back to his lodgings where his wife gave
me a splendid tea with potted-meat sandwiches and rock cakes. Food, I quickly became aware, was a real problem. Dot provided me with breakfast, bread and marge and tea, and dinner – usually
something like stuffed sheep’s heart with gravy and cabbage and potatoes – at six o’clock before the performance. Aside from that, I had to fend for myself.