Last time we’d stayed there, Dad had been in the Indian Army, but now it was 1948, he had no job and there were none available – the demobbed soldiers of the British wartime army had scooped up most of them, and the Brits who returned from India the year before us had got the rest. The only work my father could find was as eighth cowman on a farm. (One of his friends, an ex-admiral, became a lavatory attendant at Waterloo station.) I never really heard Mum and Dad grumble or complain or look back to the Good Old Days; Mum, especially, was homesick for India (she was not burdened with the terrible memories that haunted Dad), but they launched themselves into their new lives. Dad would set off for the farm on his second-hand motorbike at crack of dawn every morning in time for milking; it was tough for a middle-aged man, he lost weight and started getting boils, but Dad believed in getting on with things – we were brought up with his advice for life ringing in our ears (though why it was always said in French has been a perpetual mystery to me): ‘Il faut saisir les occasions quand elles se présentent’, which basically means seize the day (it’s the reason Tessa and I found ourselves in a helicopter in the Vietnam War, but I’ll come to that later).
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