helmet when working. He left no issue but to Kitty he had willed Flowerdew, a largeish house about a dozen miles from Lavenstock, named for the Elizabethan adventurer who had built it. The place had belonged to Alfredâs family for generations and was shabby through a continued lack of interest in spending money on its maintenance. It was also extremely inconvenient by modern standards, but he hoped she would continue to use it as a retreat in the intervals of grubbing about in the sand.
Kitty, Sophie gathered when she began to piece the bits of her life together, had done as Alfred wished and kept the house as her base whenever she was in England with the exception of the war years, when she had enlisted in the ATS in the hope of being sent abroad. In view of her intimate knowledge of the Middle East, however, she was immediately put on to secret work at the War Office, where she was kept for the duration. Obliged to make the best of it, she worked off her ferocious energy in the little spare time she had by writing books about her work on the excavations of Carthage, which were published with some success after the war. Not even the publicity this brought her (which she was not slow to play up to by adopting a flamboyant style of dressing) could keep her permanently from her lifeâs work in Tunisia, however. When the flush of fame had died down she returned there, until age and arthritis forced her to retire permanently to Flowerdew. She put on weight, grew more bizarre than ever, drank quantities of sweet mint tea all day long and became obsessed with the idea that she was about to die and that she must write her memoirs before she did.
It would give her something to occupy herself with, she announced and besides, the money would come in useful. Flowerdew had never recovered from its sad neglect before and during the war; it had now reached the age where it was threatening to fall into complete ruin if it were not propitiated by having vast sums of money spent on it. Money didnât have the same value as it had when Alfred died; she was growing poor. Nobody believed this. Alfred had left her what was a comfortable fortune by any standards but, open-handed in other directions, she was certainly canny with money.
Writing had always come easily to Kitty and despite her belief in her imminent demise the flow was unstemmed. She had a trained mind well-honed by her days at Girton, her notes had always been meticulously kept and arranged, she had an excellent memory and she was blessed with a prose style that was sharp and entertaining and not at all what might have been expected from her dusty subject. Her lightness of touch was frowned upon by other academics â Funerary Customs and Sacrificial Rites in Phoenician Carthage, the title of her latest book, and the Punic Wars, in which field she was an acknowledged expert, were after all no laughing matter â although no fault could be found with her scholarship. They were only jealous, Kitty retorted, because her books continued to sell well. And not only as textbooks for serious students but to armchair archaeologists who preferred to take their doses of culture sweetened by a little lightness and humour.
When it came to her memoirs, however, it became apparent that Kittyâs normal exuberance and enthusiasm would need to be leavened with circumspection. Her personal life had been enlivened by encounters and friendships with all sorts and conditions of people; she had met princes and potentates and what she had to tell was quite often scandalous, sometimes libellous, and would certainly not be well received in the touchy climate of Middle Eastern politics. Even she began to realize that she must cut and prune and omit where necessary, something that went so much against the grain of her own nature that she began to lose interest in the idea.
It was Madeleine Freeman who suggested she employ a secretary. Madeleine was Kittyâs doctor, a sensible and