A week or two after his arrival he died of cerebral malaria. After Sam’s death our friendship with Basanta gradually failed. India re-absorbed him and we changed. There came one more death among our friends; a girl who had been a friend of Sam’s at Oxford and had married another friend at Balliol. They used to come out together to Islip with Basanta and talk philosophy. She died in childbirth. There had been insufficient care in the pre-natal period and a midwife attended the case without having sterilized her hands after attending an infectious case. Deaths in childbirth had as particular horror for me now as they had for Nancy. I had assisted the midwife at the birth of Sam, our fourth child, and could not have believed that a natural process like birth could be so abominable in its pain and extravagant messiness. Many deaths and a feeling of bad luck clouded these years. Islip was no longer a country refuge. I found myself resorting to my war-time technique of getting through things somehow, anyhow, in the hope that they would mend. Nancy was in poor health and able to do less and less work. Our finances had been improved by an allowance from Nancy’s father that covered the extra expense of the new children—we now had about two hundred pounds a year—but I decided that cottage life with four of them under six years old, and Nancy ill, was not good enough. I would have, after all, to take a job. Nancy and I had always sworn that we would manage somehow so that this would not be necessary.