At first we had so little money that we did all the work in the house ourselves, including the washing. I did the cooking, Nancy did the mending and making the children’s clothes; we shared the rest of the work. Later money improved: we found it more economical to send the washing out and get a neighbour in to do some of the heavier cleaning and scrubbing. In our last year at Islip we even had a decrepit car which Nancy drove. My part was to wind it up; the energy that I put into winding was almost equivalent to pushing it for a mile or two. The friends who gave it to us told us that its name was ‘Dr. Marie,’ and when we asked ‘Why?’ we were told ‘Because it’s all right in theory.’ One day when Nancy was driving down Foxcombe Hill, the steepest hill near Oxford, there was a slight jar. Nancy thought it advisable to stop; when we got out we found that there were only three wheels on the car. The other, with part of the axle, was retrieved nearly a mile back. These four years I spent chiefly on housework and being nurse to the children. Catherine was born in 1922 and Sam in 1924. By the end of 1925 we had lived for eight successive years in an atmosphere of teething, minor accidents, epidemics, and perpetual washing of children’s napkins. I did not dislike this sort of life except for the money difficulties, I liked my life with the children. But the strain told on Nancy. She was constantly ill, and often I had to take charge of everything. She tried occasionally to draw; but by the time she had got her materials together some alarm from the nursery would always disturb her. She said at last that she would not start again until all the children were house-trained and old enough for school. I kept on writing because the responsibility for making money rested chiefly on me, and because nothing has ever stopped me writing when I have had something to write. We kept the cottage cleaned and polished in a routine that left us little time for anything else. We had accumulated a number of brass ornaments and utensils and allowed them to become a tyranny, and our children wore five times as many clean dresses as our neighbours’ children did.