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Then when I got home to London in September 1945 I found that the whole grandiose social whirl had started up again, as if there had been only a blip since September 1939. Almost every night there were what used to be known as debutante dances, to which those considered acceptable were invited and to which I had the entree through my sister Vivien and my aunt Irene Ravensdale. And each of these dances seemed to consist of an enchanted garden of girls. How was it that I had taken so little note of girls before? At public school and then as an army recruit (reputedly dosed with bromide in our tea) – well, perhaps this was understandable. And then in Italy there had been such dire and extravagant warnings about the likely effects of going with local women – including illustrations of physical deformities attendant on syphilis and gonorrhoea – that this had made it all too easy to cling to virginity. But now in London I wanted to collect great armfuls of these available girls; but with them too it seemed there were taboos.

It was thought not proper to ‘proposition’ more than one girl at a time; and to ‘go the whole hog’ (as the phrase then was) landed one with expectations of marriage. And yet the force of one’s desire indiscriminately to ‘gather ye rosebuds ye may’ seemed to have the explosive strength of whatever it was at the heart of matter. This was a first paradox of peace – the strings of sexuality and social customs seemed to tie one into knots. And there I had only a week or two before the boat left for Japan!

But might a paradox produce not only desolation, but also another miracle?

One evening, at a dance in a grand London hotel teeming with allurement, I retired to the bar to gain a respite from my fevered efforts to chat up, or to gather up, half a dozen girls at once, and there I came across a major I knew slightly, or perhaps he was a friend of my sisters, and he asked me what I was doing nowadays, and I said I was just off to the Far East. And he said ‘My dear fellow, why do you want to do that?’ And I said ‘I don’t.’ So he said ‘Come and see me in the War Office in the morning.’ So I did, and I did not know if he would even remember me. But there he was behind his desk, and he said ‘I’m afraid I can’t quite manage the War Office, but would a job in Eastern Command, Hounslow, do?’ And I said ‘Indeed, thank you, Eastern Command, Hounslow, would do very well!’ And so in a day or two I received papers taking me off the draft to the Far East and telling me to report to Hounslow Barracks, a gaunt building like a furniture depository, but only forty minutes by underground from Central London where I could lodge with my grandmother or aunt, and continue my juvenile researches into the natural history of girls.

But then, as soon as time-pressure was lifted, there was the problem of how on earth, amongst such profusion, one might be led to pick just one particular girl rather than another? Sexual desire? Companionship? Social compatibility? But since it seemed that a life-time might be at stake, surely something more outlandish, even mystical, was required: some jungle-test that animals make use of like a smell?

There was a girl I had taken special note of at one of the London dances and I thought she had taken note of me; but I had not pursued her or pounced – for would not the natural outcome of a pounce be to drive a worthy quarry away? But then I came across this girl a week or two later in a coffee-bar in Oxford, and I asked her if she remembered me, and she said ‘Oh yes, I thought you were that murderer.’ There was a notorious murderer on the loose at the time who chopped women up and dissolved them in the bath. Well, this could be said to be outlandish! And then when we were having dinner the next day (a suspect murderer might surely be expected to pounce) she was silent for a time while I rattled on, and then when I stopped in order to ask her what she was thinking, she said – ‘That I could send you mad in a fortnight.’ So – so – some jungle-testing indeed! Anyway, whatever it was, I seemed to be finding it irresistible.

I have told the story of these my first meetings with my future first wife Rosemary at the end of Time at War, and there is no need to go into many of the somewhat crazy details again. But the point was – I was evidently in a fairly crazy condition myself on return from war, and needed someone to hold on to who might be compatible with my confusion. My first heartfelt love on my return from Italy had been for a girl (I am going to continue to use the now-unfashionable word ‘girl’ because this was the heartfelt word at the time) who was both very pretty and yet practical and hardworking, and thus in these ways might seem to be complementary to me. But after a time we both came to feel that my vagaries might tip one or both of us over the edge. Rosemary, whom I met when my first love had gone to work as a secretary at the inaugural United Nations meetings in New York, was someone who seemed to be in tune with my feeling that it was the world that was half over the edge, but that she and I together might be able to hang on by our fingertips.

It is only in my old age that I have been able to see in what an almost clinically unstable condition I must have been at the end of the war. Nowadays it seems to be accepted that people who have experienced war may need ‘counselling.’ I had gone straight from school into the army when I was eighteen and for a year and a half had been engaged on and off in traumatic fighting. And before this, oh yes (oh dear!), my mother had died when I was nine, reputedly of a broken heart, and my father had gone to prison when I was sixteen; he had been the leader of the British Union of Fascists, and in war was seen as a security risk. None of this had struck me at the time as a reason for myself to be particularly disturbed – indeed I had looked on my war-time relationship with my father as one of the things that had kept me comparatively sane – we had talked and then corresponded lengthily about ideas, books, philosophy – anything but politics. But now, in 1946 here I was finding it difficult to get out of bed in the morning to go to Hounslow to do my boring job which concerned officers’ pay and courts-martial; and difficult to get through the day in any reasonable condition until I could start drinking in the evenings.

At this time I still had a bad stammer that had started in childhood (how I had been accepted as an army officer I do not know, except that at times of life-or-death crises stammerers may become articulate). But much of my job in Hounslow depended on the telephone, and this was a torment; and my ability to partake in any social life in the evenings came to depend more and more on alcohol. The army did in fact after the war arrange most helpfully for me to have ‘counselling’ for my stammer. I was sent to one of the few speech specialists who ever seemed to me to make sense. He told me – ‘A stammer can be a defence-mechanism against other people’s potential aggression against oneself; but also, and perhaps more importantly, it can be a curb on the stammerer’s feelings of aggression against other people.’ Much of my early sense of being at odds with the world had taken the form of thinking it was the world that was mad rather than myself; and perhaps I needed to be protected from too often expressing this too.

Also - Hence the need to find someone I loved who would feel herself sufficiently an ‘outsider’ not to need to get carried off in the mainstream of society, but not such a ‘loner’ as to be swept with me towards any available shallows or rapids.

When I first started taking Rosemary out in Oxford – she was at the Ruskin School of Art; I had got out of the army a year early in October 1946 to take up a place being kept for me at Balliol – after our first eccentric meetings I had got the impression that she must come from a poor if unusual family, because in spite of her appearance at a debutante ball she now wore somewhat dilapidated clothes and did not seem to have enough money for bus fares. For our third meeting I suggested that the following Sunday we might go for a drive in my car, and she said could we go and visit her old grandmother in Hertfordshire. I said – Indeed – and was interested to see (though such was the style of our budding relationship that I did not think it would be a good tactic to inquire) what I would find.

So on Sunday we drove through country lanes and came eventually to the gates and lodge of what seemed to be a drive that would lead to a large country house. An old lady came out from the lodge to open the gates. I wondered – Is this Rosemary’s grandmother? The old lady waved us through. We drove across what seemed to be endless acres of parkland and came to a long low house like a battleship. We went in through a back door and along stone passages where all life seemed to have stopped; then through a green baize door. We paused outside what might be a small sitting room. Here Rosemary asked me to wait for a moment. Then when she ushered me in there was a very old lady in a wheelchair who, when her granddaughter had introduced me, said ‘And I was such a friend of your grandfather’s!’

I still did not know who this lady was, who had been a friend of my grandfather George Curzon. (Later that day I managed to catch a glimpse of an envelope on a desk addressed to ‘Lady Desborough.’) After some chat she asked Rosemary if I would like to see what she called ‘the paintings.’ She handed to Rosemary a huge old-fashioned key and we went down a long corridor of tattered grandeur and into a large high picture gallery where, when Rosemary had opened a creaking shutter or two, there appeared – looming through cobwebs – a Van Dyck? A Teniers? A renaissance Holy Family? There was a huge portrait of a soldier on horseback that could be – surely could not be! – a Rembrandt? Rosemary said ‘Well, they say it is.’ I felt it crucial that I should not appear to be bowled over by all this. Why should not this particular set of circumstances, after all, be as natural as any other? But it did now seem (such indeed is human nature) that there were practical as well as outlandish reasons why we should marry.

Lord Curzon had been my mother’s father, viceroy of India, foreign secretary under Lloyd George, then tipped to be prime minister but had had to make way for Baldwin. During my childhood my mother’s family had been a counter-weight to my father’s disreputable politics. And it seemed there were similar balancing paradoxes here.

Rosemary wanted to be a painter. And although her family (as I was now learning) had in the past been remarkable patrons and collectors of art, it had not seemed easy for Rosemary to break away from the grand style of her background in order to dedicate herself to being an artist. For this not to be too laborious, might not she need to find a partner who also had a foot as it were in both camps?

And indeed I at this time was beginning to need to get away from my father. And I was wanting most urgently, after the postponements of war, to begin to write my first novel.

So did it not seem in the nature of things that we should marry?