I got work in a bookshop, two or three days a week. I lived with a family in Salford (they had an ummarried daughter who worked at the Colgate factory and slept in the room next to mine: at night I could hear her turn over heavily in her sleep on the other side of the partition wall), then on an impulse moved into a bedsit near the top of a detached house near the East Lancs Road. There I had my own door and my own coal fire, and on my first night found myself, mysteriously exhausted by a winter spent gazing into lighted shop windows, writing a letter which began, ‘We’re all cobbled together like Frankenstein’s creatures from the outside more than the in – we’re what other people make of us.’ It was to Pauline. ‘Wales is less than two hours away,’ I sometimes still boasted to her, without explaining that I had no-one to go there with: ‘All that rock!’ She would reply, ‘I’m glad,’ or, ‘I’m so glad you’re enjoying it.’ That Christmas she sent me a collection of climbing photos taken in the late nineteenth century.
