Mair

In those days I was greatly interested in the World Congress of Faiths, an organisation founded by the explorer Sir Francis Young husband with the conviction that much of the strife in the world was rooted in ignorance among religious adherents of the similarity of the beliefs held by others. The WCF therefore worked to bring their leaders together to foster mutual understanding and tolerance among their teachers and followers. I was immediately attracted to the concept and was charged with creating a Youth Group to propagate these ideals. It was a task which brought me together with some of the leading personalities in the post-war renaissance of liberal thought. Bertrand Russell, Sir George Trevelyan and their counterparts, but also some of the Eastern leaders such as Vilayat lnayat Khan, head of the Sufi community in the West. This, too, proved a rite of passage and a valuable early lesson in how to move among the real stars and the nebulae they attract. Indeed, the ironies of moving between the intellectually as well as providentially rich and those with greatly restricted lives, have made me socially infinitely adaptable. This was a unique preparation also for living among people of different races and coming face to face with abject poverty.

I carried the ideals of the WCF with me to South Wales, where in 1949 virtually the whole drawing office was moved to work on a contract to design the massive foundations for the Trostre tinplate mill in Llanelly. It became a major undertaking for us and some 12 additional staff recruited locally. Among them was Mair Davies, a fresh and delightfully unaffected young lady of true Welsh parentage, unlike any girl I had encountered before.

An old Morris Minor took Mair and me on our secret honeymoon. Seeking wholly irrationally to outflank anticipated resistance from all our families, we found an idyllic spot in Surrey to wed and to honeymoon, away from it all. Equally irrationally, we thought to complete the romantic idyll by starting a family. And so the father's lack of civil courage, compounded several times over, came to be laid in the cradle of  baby Caroline. Her birth saw our return to London, and made her and her mother the prime casualties of my still incomplete efforts to deal with a life encompassing several dimensions at the same time. Remorse for the hurt done to mother and daughter has remained a deep wound within me to this day.