Words come back. Something about a girl on a sled, and her cousin the arch-duke. The opening of 'The Waste Land', just a piece of a poem that we studied at school. When I get home I will look it out. It must be there somewhere on the shelves, but such a slim book slipped in among all the others that I have not seen it for years. I have noticed this before, that when you are out of England things come to haunt you, words, books, pieces of knowledge that were taken for granted at home. Memories. Once I spent a whole holiday with my husband trying to remember the name of some film we had seen, something quite un-important that it had occurred to one or other of us to mention - and this when we were young, before we had grown old and conscious of forgetting things. We were in Spain, travelling, inland where it was dry and wild and the plains stretched for hours before us. If we had met another person from England we would have asked, but there was no one to meet, only villages that were emptied with people hiding from the heat.
