I was sent to a finishing school, which didn't last long when mother found out how badly chaperoned we were. Then I 'came out' before going to a domestic science school.
I remember the evacuee children from towns and cities throwing stones at the farm animals. When we explained that if you did that you wouldn't have any milk, meat or eggs, they soon learned to respect the animals.
My father was a soldier and my mother was a great mover. She once counted up how many places she had lived in during the first 25 years of her marriage and it came to 20.
Each marriage has to be judged separately, and we never know what's going on in another person's marriage.
People try much less hard to make a marriage work than they used to fifty years ago. Divorce is easier.
We're all like children. We may think we grow up, but to me, being grown up is death, stopping thinking, trying to find out things, going on learning.
That image of the countryside being a threatening place still exists. People continue to resist the challenge of learning about aspects of life they don't understand.
Imagination which comes into play in falling in love is different from any other. Certainly in my case, and I've fallen in love all my life, one imagines the person to be as you want them to be. They frequently turn out to be someone different, for better or worse.
I have deliberately left Sylvester and Julia's appearances to the reader's imagination.
Women's courage is rather different from men's. The fact that women have to bring up children and look after husbands makes them braver at facing long-term issues, such as illness. Men are more immediately courageous. Lots of people are brave in battle.
Twenty years ago, I was living in a lovely cottage on the edge of Dartmoor but I couldn't afford to run a car.