Helen knew  her old haunts, and we hired some horses and would go riding over the Cotswolds to Stow-in-the-Wold through woods coloured mauve with autumn primroses,and over to Broadway and other villages. We were also joined by her vivacious friend from the Wrens, Jane Williams daughter of the Dean of Winchester who later was to become Lady Portal wife of the paper magnate that still supplies the paper for all the banknotes that are used in the country.Together we had many happy hours riding and we also  earned some extra money, by plum picking in the prolific orchards nearby. On demobilization  all servicemen were given a chance to take up a vocational training course and Helen chose music appreciation and the arts and once she had completed her course she was found a very pleasant but poorly paid job with the Arts Council one perk of which was to get free theatre tickets. Unfortunately after a couple of years she gave up this interesting post where she was in the centre of the social scene with her friends from Tudor hall and went and buried herself as a personal help and assistant to an old lady in the depths of Norfolk and isolated herself from all the interesting things that were going on.
Again the winter of 1947 was harsh although not as bad the previous one. In the autumn Hugh had arrived on leave from Ceylon and with Helen, they  took a small flat just off the Earl’s Court Road. In November we were  given leave from Bradfield to go and see the wedding of the beautiful Princess Elizabeth to the young ex Naval Officer, Prince Phillip of Greece. This was the first big Post War Pageant which the British as a Nation absolutely adore, more so then after all the drab years of War. It gave everyone a chance to celebrate and let of steam and people queued and camped out in the open along the route to get a good view. I came down , spent a night at the flat and went out with Hugh at 8 am on a typical dull misty November 20th  morning. We made our way to the Mall towards Buckingham Palace but the crowds were so deep it would have been impossible to see anything. Finally we managed to weedle our way to a young Plane tree and with help from other onlookers we clambered our way into the bare leafless branches and had a grandstand  view of the whole brilliant occasion. The procession of the horse guards  in their glittering silver breast plates and red tunics in their white cocked hats, trotting down The Mall, the open carriages with the Princess and Duke, the deafening cheers from the crowds looked like  a scene from a fairy tale setting, and quite overwhelmed me never having seen a spectacle like that before. Then they were followed by the diplomatic limosines, and as Molotov the Russian Ambassador drove past he was roundly booed and stones and sticks were flung at his car!  I came back and had Christmas with Hugh and Helen and when it was time to go back to school , I shook hands with Hugh who a few days later was off to Kenya, as the start of his African odyssey. It  was to be 17 years before we met up with each other again, after he had a wealth of experiences and stories to tell of all his adventures in the bush.
In the spring of 1948 through Sally de Luppe who was a wealthy American socialite  and the Count, I was invited to to stay with them in Paris at their beautiful apartment by the Quai D’Orsay.  I flew from Northholt to Le Bourget in a small French  four engined  plane. When we disembarked and I went through passport control, the official would not allow me in because although I had a British passport, it had been issued in Ceylon. Luckily on the plane was a diplomat from the British Embassy who assured him that I was just as much British as having a passport issued  in London. This little episode seems so strange now in the context of a Common Market and the European Union, but then  journeying to France really meant one was in a totally foreign country. After a few days in the Count de Luppe’s huge apartment I journeyed down to Bordeaux to stay for three weeks with an elderly French Colonel in Lot et Garonne. The countryside was bathed in warm spring sunshine and everywhere the purple Judas trees were in flower. My host was a charming man, an ardent royalist who cursed the socialists with every breath and lived in one of those lovely large rambling French Country Houses. He was very hard on my learning, and I would spend each morning wading through Le Cid.  I was able to prattle away colloquially quite quickly, but my deeper understanding of the language hardly progressed at all in spite of his valiant efforts. One day with M. Cure we all squeezed into a tiny 5 hp Bug Fiat and went to Lourdes in the Pyrenees. The overall impression I had of France on this visit, was one of grinding poverty in the countryside and towns. When compared to England, where even at that post war period things were tight, the dilapidation, dirt and bedraggledness of the towns and villages were quite shocking. On my own there was little to  do. The Colonel warned me about swimming in the swift flowing Garonne but I used to dive in upstream and swim down with the fast current  and emerge a few hundred yards downstream and then walk back and repeat the exercise. At 17 years of age, I was strong, supple, wiry and quite a fair swimmer and in the warm spring sunshine it felt good to be alive.
The trip was so successful, that when I got back to Paris , Sally arranged for me to come again this time to stay at a Chateau in Normandy with some friends of hers, for the summer holidays. But before then it was back to Bradfield and constant work and cramming to pass my Matriculation. I worked every spare moment, made little cramming cards to memorise facts at any opportunity, and then finally was the big exam with 9 subjects that were the culmination of my catching up after the loss of  five years education.  Finally it was over and such a relief that at last one could relax. I took the cross Channel ferry and the train to Paris to Sally’s where again I spent a couple of enjoyable days racing at St Cloud. One evening she had a cocktail party to which a lot of guests from the American Embassy had been invited. It was the time of  pre-election fever for electing the new president of the United States. The  one subject on everyones lips and without exception they all were agreed was that they damned and cursed   Harry Truman as being uneducated and out of his depth, and above all the Democrats were corrupt. I just a young man listened intently  without daring to say a word, but secretly I was all for Truman as he had dropped the bomb that had saved my own and countless other lives in Japan, he had stood up to the Russians, and I knew nothing of the corruption in America. Anyway everyone was pleased that soon he would be out, and be replaced by Dewey. All the opinion polls were giving Dewey an overwhelming lead and the outcome was a foregone conclusion. Later in November I smiled quietly to myself when in the biggest upset ever,  in spite of all  the opinion polls, Truman won the presidency in his own right, as prior to that he had stepped up to the job from being vice president to Franklin Roosevelt who died in 1945 just prior  to the end of the war.
From Paris I journeyed on to Normandy. The train drew into Caen where the station had been made usable, but   elsewhere the city was in complete and utter ruin. It was now four years after Montgomery had pivoted the German army on the city in one of the bitterest actions against the Wermacht of the whole Normandy campaign, until the Americans  finally broke out and encircled the rest of the panzers at Falaise. Now as I passed through Caen there was hardly a building that was complete and had all its walls standing. The cathedral miraculously was more or less intact, but everywhere  else was an absolute shambles from the house to house fighting, shelling and bombing.Still four  years later there were few roofs intact on the buildings and

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