Consequently we spent a lot of time having parties and love affairs because every time might have been the last time.”It was, Mary explained to her captive audience, a good thing that women of the younger generation now have a greater sexual freedom but she wondered if sometimes it means they are a lot more indiscriminate than they might be “In my day,” she said. I was married myself with young children and so she safely assumed I would know. When I told her how it all worked she just couldn’t believe it!”But the longer the war went on the more freedom women gained. “We had fun during the war because there was a sense, and this is what I tried to capture in the Camomile Lawn, that we might not have another chance.

“Here, here,” said the elderly Cheltenham gentleman seated at the back of the hall. “I never got a good look at my wife’s body for years and even then we had to have the lights off.”Mary, who didn’t write her first novel, Jumping The Queue, until she was 70, gained her own sexual education in a time when young women were kept ignorant and innocent and the majority of her peers didn’t have a clue what to expect. “I remember during the war, a young girl of 24 years old who was engaged to be married came up to me and asked if I could explain to her what would happen on her wedding night. “All those long languorous sex scenes were so out of context because we didn’t have central heating during the war and so although we certainly had lots of sex, we certainly didn’t take all our clothes of It was far too cold for all that. We went to bed in several sturdy sweaters and only took some of them off when we were actually under the blankets.”It wasn’t she explained that she was a prude, far from it, just that it made her extremely angry that the BBC had seen fit to abandon completely the period of the book “Unforgivable”, she added. “I hated the way they adapted the Camomile Lawn for the television”, she fumed. “Well, when I heard about Dunblane, I felt nothing.” Nothing? Even though you are a parent yourself? “I just felt nothing It was the same with Princess Diana.

When someone phoned me at 7am to say she had died, my first thought was: “Yes, but is that any reason to phone someone at 7am?” But why? He doesn’t know, he says. Perhaps, he then adds, “it’s because I have a sliver of glass in my heart.” Perhaps, I tell him, it’s because he is frightened of his own emotional impulses.He accepts I might have a point. He very much does feel there might be some evil genie within. Later, when we discuss abortion, and I ask him if it can be acceptable in any circumstances, he comes out with a very odd reply “No.