3 December 2020 Mary Wesley I have deliberately left Sylvester and Julia’s appearances to the reader’s imagination.
3 December 2020 Mary Wesley Each marriage has to be judged separately, and we never know what’s going on in another person’s marriage.
3 December 2020 Mary Wesley That image of the countryside being a threatening place still exists. People continue to resist the challenge of learning about aspects of life they don’t understand.
3 December 2020 Mary Wesley I was sent to a finishing school, which didn’t last long when mother found out how badly chaperoned we were. Then I ‘came out’ before going to a domestic science school.
3 December 2020 Mary Wesley My father was a soldier and my mother was a great mover. She once counted up how many places she had lived in during the first 25 years of her marriage and it came to 20.
3 December 2020 Mary Wesley We’re all like children. We may think we grow up, but to me, being grown up is death, stopping thinking, trying to find out things, going on learning.
3 December 2020 Mary Wesley Twenty years ago, I was living in a lovely cottage on the edge of Dartmoor but I couldn’t afford to run a car.
3 December 2020 Mary Wesley People try much less hard to make a marriage work than they used to fifty years ago. Divorce is easier.
3 December 2020 Mary Wesley I remember the evacuee children from towns and cities throwing stones at the farm animals. When we explained that if you did that you wouldn’t have any milk, meat or eggs, they soon learned to respect the animals.
