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NO BITCH 9ST 6LB WE HAVE TWO MASTIFFS BETTER LEAVE BITCH BEHIND . The ‘bitch’ was my grandmother. Alone in being able to read what he had written, to Winnie fell the task of typing out his journals and books.
    He never owned a house. As his fame grew, so did the procession of visitors to the homes he rented, in Sussex and then, after war broke out, in Oxford. My mother remembered meeting Henry Williamson (‘he didn’t like beds and slept on the floor’), George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, John Betjeman (he gave the speech at her wedding) and A. P. Herbert.
    Graham Greene told me that he, too, had made a pilgrimage to see my grandfather. A scourge of old fogies, SPB had been kind to him when he was a young writer and he felt genuine gratitude – which Greene acknowledged by using his name for a character in Brighton Rock : ‘See that man going to the Gents’? That’s Mais. The brewer. He’s worth a hundred thousand nicker.’
    In the real world, SPB was worth nothing of the sort. It seems unfair on him that he flourished at a time before journalists with his profile were properly paid. I grew up with the lesson that his fame had brought him no fortune at all. And yet he continued to cling to a hope – which Priscilla inherited – of writing that one book which would rescue him from penury and the bailiffs, and earn a life-changing sum greater than the £100 advances which he latterly received for Books I Like , its sequel More Books I Like , and for leisurely travel books such as Mediterranean Cruise Holiday , South African Cruise Holiday , Continental Coach Tour Holiday .
    He wrote in his diary on 30 December 1939: ‘I would give a great deal to write a really good book that would move people.’ But he was too oppressed by financial worries and depression to apply to his own work the craftsmanship that he admired in his successful friends. His syntax betrayed his agitation. ‘I still feel I have it in me, but I can’t as yet dig down to it because I’ve never had enough time to write it before having to switch off to earn quickly money to live meanwhile.’ In his struggle to maintain some kind of footing, he may have been unable to sit with his work longer. One of his radio producers complained: ‘You seem to write books faster than I can write letters,’ after receiving a copy of SPB’s ‘boy’s book’, The Three-Coloured Pencil – puffed by its author as ‘a superb achievement in the true Buchan manner which I hope you will both approve and read in that order ’.
    SPB most aspired to write a book like The Thirty-nine Steps . He regarded John Buchan’s spy thriller, published in 1915, as containing one of the finest descriptions of a man-hunt that he knew, and was twice spurred to emulate it. The Thirty-nine Steps was among the first novels that he sent to Paris for Priscilla to read in her convalescence, and which caused Doris to complain in her sharp voice: ‘You always have your nose buried in a book.’
    With Gillian’s support, Priscilla recovered her health – until the day arrived when she could stand up. Gillian observed her walking across the bedroom and recognised how Priscilla had grown while she had been ill. The transform­ation was striking. The immature girl who had spent a year on a stretcherwas a young woman with a figure. Her puppy fat had fallen away, her straight hair had sprouted back in thick blonde curls. Her body was riper, and she was as tall as Doris.

    Her mother did not hide her resentment. ‘You think you are pretty. Fair hair and blue eyes are very commonplace – your sister and I with our dark hair and grey eyes are far more interesting. We are exotic.’ She made personal remarks about her daughter in front of others: ‘Priscilla is developing quite nice breasts.’ Priscilla would blush furiously and leave the room.
    Doris insisted on dressing