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parents. On one of his regular coastal walks, he fell to his death from the path onto rocks near Helen’s Bay. There was a lot of gossip about whether it was suicide, or whether he had been drunk, and lost his footing. Celia had loved him very much, and I too had been fond of him.
    Celia’s plumply packed WRNS ’s costume gave her the edge over me in my navy blue and maroon sixth-form school uniform, although, after removing the elastic chin-strap, it was possible to adjust the brim of the maroon felt winter hat to a becoming angle, and in spring the beret, also carefully angled, could look almost Parisian. Such modifications, combined with copious amounts of lipstick, did not escape notice and one of my teachers, who must have spotted me in Campbell’s Coffee Shop in central Belfast, reported them to our head. I was carpeted for degrading the image of the school, of which I should be a proud ambassadress, should be ashamed of myself, show some respect for tradition, and so on.
    A group of international bridge players met regularly in Campbell’s: these predators made a determined effort to tempt us with offers of lessons to take place in the evenings at a venue in Duncairn Avenue. We were not interested in learning this social accomplishment, although Celia was tempted by the fact that one of the pair had influence within the Group Theatre. I wonder, had they been more attractive, whether we might have succumbed. Most persistent were a portly, balding man in his late forties and his bridge-playing partner, who liked to be addressed as ‘Major’. The latter was sinister, with cold reptilian eyes and tinted glasses – a Bond film character. Our evasive tactics became transparent to the point that they finally got the message, blanking us thereafter.
    Many factors led to Celia and me drifting apart: I had developed vague leftist tendencies and, in the absence of a Communist candidate, my first vote went to a Labour candidate at Sydenham. My mother must have been hurt by this break with Conservatism, which had been taken for granted in her family. Free love was in, Empire and the royal family were out, and I despised those dark-suited, bowler-hatted Orangemen with their Lambeg drums, twirling batons and banners of King Billy on his white horse. Celia was deeply wary of Roman Catholics, and habitually referred to working-class people in lofty tones: ‘What else can you expect from these people?’ Obsessed by fear of ‘ending up on the shelf’, her ambition was to marry early and bear many children. Having already seen off a number of ardent suitors, she regaled me with details of how far they had gone without actually ‘doing it’. She was determined to reach the altar a virgin. I had other plans.
    Celia had not long to wait. The directors and trainee managers of Ewart’s linen mills were habitués at Campbell’s, and one of these, an ex- RAF officer, was not long divorced from the wife he had married in a whirlwind wartime romance. Tall, personable, socially well-connected, and an Oxford graduate, he was thirtyeight by the time he met Celia. She told me how much more secure she felt in the company of a mature man, compared with the callow youths she had gone out with in the past. Their engagement was announced, despite the social ostracism that still lingered where divorced persons were concerned. Celia’s mother was none too pleased, nor was the prospective groom’s ambitious American mother, who felt her son had learned little from his earlier experience. His father, on the contrary, was indulgent, having also fallen under the spell of Celia’s pneumatic charms.
    Meanwhile, in September 1945 I drifted into an apprenticeship with a commercial photographic firm in Belfast owned by the husband of a woman my mother had befriended at the group which met to knit balaclavas, scarves, socks, mittens and gloves for the forces. My mother paid £500 for the