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There are nearly a hundred steps from the road to our hilltop house. It is winter and the garden has that half-dead look which makes one disbelieve in a coming spring. There is a tall cypress... tall? It had been shoulder-high when I left. There is a light in our sitting-room window. I reach our front door. I had shut it behind me more than three years ago. It will be the doorway to a new life. I press the bell.

* * * * *

Minna opened the door immediately. Had she been watching from the window? I lugged in my kitbag, took her in my arms and kissed her with enthusiasm. She said: 'Father Richard is here.'

Between the front door and the door to the sitting room fury and caution battled. Caution won. He was sitting in my Parker Knoll chair, this darkly-handsome young Catholic priest. Minna had once written that she permitted no-one to sit there. It awaited my return. So this was the fellow whose missionary zeal was threatening my marriage. My instinct was to take him by his Roman collar - the collar which had saved him from the crudities of military life - and bundle him out through the front door. He rose to shake my hand. I gave him the limpest response.

My anger had subsided. He was not the enemy. He was just a foot-soldier in the pay of his church as I had been a pawn on the Army chess-board. He replaced himself on one of our dining-chairs. Minna had followed me in. I turned my back on them both to look out of the window. There was nothing but darkness out there.

Minna said, 'You must be tired and hungry Len. I'll get us some tea.' I heard the priest telling me how he admired Minna for her wartime courage and her enquiring mind, felt that she and his family had become real friends, would like to be my friend also. I looked at his rather thick lips and the old Adam urged me to thicken them still further. Whenever the subject of Catholicism seemed about to surface I obliterated it with a jocular account of my homeward journey.

Tea was an uneasy meal. If this encounter had been staged in the hope of reconciling me to Minna's changed attitude towards me, it failed. I had but a narrow strip of ground on which to build my defences and I would not yield an inch. Any sign of my fury would widen the gap with Minna.. I treated the priest as if he were trying to raise funds for the church roof. He got the message and was gone in less than half an hour.

His departure left a tense silence as I tried to forgive Minna's crass insensitivity . She... the most sensitive person I had ever known. To break the silence... 'I bought you a Madonna in Rome'... before she could reproach me. I unrolled the big Lippo Lippi Alinari ptint and laid it on our long table. It was a mild success . 'Now let's have a little celebration,' I said, bringing out a bottle of sherry from my back-pack. Diversionary tactics. God, that such should be needed! with US.

Family news from Denmark carried us over another potential crevasse. No embraces, no words of endearment. While Minna prepared supper, I changed into one of my pre-war suits. The waistband was loose. A Van Heusen shirt (fumbling with unfamiliar cuff-links!) and a tasteful tie transformed me into something like the fellow I had once been.

'Tell me Minna.. are my old pyjamas still presentable?' She nodded. 'O.K.' I said, 'I'll take them into my bedroom.' She turned her head aside, muttered 'Yes, of course.' Then, 'Whatever will you think of me?.' 'I love you,' I replied.

We ate to the sound of the Peer Gynt suite. I could feel the tension easing - a tiny recapturing of happier days. The evening passed in a gentle way. No confrontations. Was quietness the key? When I kissed her goodnight she whispered 'lt is so good to have you back.' 'I love you, and I'm so glad to be home.'

In the night I remembered one of my letters home. I imagined my return: 'I wonder how it will be when we look into each other's eyes again and see all the heartbreak and longing we have suffered. I think we shall be very kind to each other and near to tears.' Now? Since meeting this priest she has become obsessed with her 'guilt' at divorcing her Danish husband, convinced that peace and pardon could be found only within the Catholic Church. There was a price: neither her divorce nor her marriage to me had any validity. If she became a Catholic we could not remain under the same roof..

I awoke to the sound of Minna preparing her morning bath and wondered if she still obeyed the wartime demand for no more than five inches of hot water. She was due at her job by nine. Should I have been angered that she had not taken time off? No. It was important our time together should be brief enough to avoid controversy, even more important to establish a routine. If I behaved calmly and normally she might yet realise our old life could be resurrected.

The day was my own, strange after years of disciplined boredom. When Minna returned I made a suggestion. Christmas would soon be here and I would like to spend it as Danish-traditionally as possible. Should we not continue in our present friendly way, getting to know each other again, leave the larger issues until the New Year?

I must make certain of SOMETHING. My old job on 'The Sporting Life'? I went to London. My editor, Ben Clements, was affable, welcoming. I could start as soon as I liked - at the same salary as when I left. 'Things are difficult. Racing is only just getting back to normal - newsprint is rationed. Sales are only just picking up.' 'Later?' 'Well, we'll have to see.' Ironic. The world had fallen apart, but the old parsimonious 'Life' was unchanged. I was offered less than in 1939 - there was a thing called 'inflation'. The ambitious plans outlined to Minna long ago? Emigration to New Zealand? Pipe dreams, never to be fulfilled.

I walked into the subs' room - just as dirty as when I left it. Stained tea-mugs littering the table. A few familiar faces, a few strangers who offered me as tepid a welcome as I had given the priest. I could see trouble ahead. Trouble was all I COULD see. I felt a sudden nostalgia for the simplicities of Algeria and Italy. But they were as unreal as England, the new Minna and this old 'Life'. Time Past and Time Present sometimes move across each other like two panes of glass etched with images. Each show identical backgrounds but changed foreground figures. I look at the dirty semi-circular window giving out on dirty Endell Street. Beneath it sits silver-haired Jimmy Cox alias 'Solon' our senior racing tipster for twenty years. Across him slides the image of a slick-haired fat stranger who sits in Jimmy's swivel chair. Jimmy needs no chair. Horizontal he - dead from cancer.

I leave, wander into the Charing Cross Road, noticing people. Many men are poor-looking, like drifting ghosts, grey, self-absorbed. Clothes-rationing - life-rationing. I can pick out the men in 'demob suits' and feel well-dressed in my pre-war finery. Do Service-women get demob suits? And would they wear them? Most of the girls seem to defy this shabby uniformity. Unchanged, thank God, the Charing Cross Road bookshops; the delicious musty print-smell on entering, the narrow back-stairs where each step is bordered with books. In Zwemmers I see two green-bound volumes - Edward MacCurdy's translation of Leonardo's Notebooks at a price I cannot afford. Hell! I rush in to buy, aching for Florence and the view from Fiesole. I have bought my passage into a mind.

Another shop offers original Piranesi engravings of eighteenth century Rome which catapult me back among my walks around that city. I still have the little pack of Piranesi postcards - haunting, even when miniaturised. I stay, nose to window, dreaming. In London a thin drizzle is turning into sleet. There? Sun and the beckoning hills. Oh God! Florence and the revelation of 'David', the golden girls walking in beauty. And Africa: dawn over the Atlas, the infinity of the Saharan sand-dunes... Now the sleet has turned the dirty pavements into blackish, slippery slush.

At home in our beloved room nothing and everything has changed. Our carefully-chosen furniture is in its proper place; nothing bought for six years. The polished windows offer the same woods and hills whose images have pervaded our letters. I sit in my big chair. Minna sits at the table writing to... whom? Time's glass panel slides across and I am pulling her up from that table. She is laughing excitedly as I kiss her and we mock-wrestle. Ib, our Scottie, gets up from his basket and seems worried. I push Minna on to the goatskin rug, she protesting, laughing. I take her by the heels and drag her towards the door. Ib barks and Minna, between cries of 'Stop it, Len!' finds time to give him a reassuring pat..... but that panel slides away. All is as before except Ib's basket. That is concealed in a cupboard, he a mound in the garden.

I thought the task of preparing a worthy Christmas under conditions differing little from wartime was a challenge Minna might welcome. It would postpone any serious discussion about our future. She had not yet been 'received' into the Catholic Church. A revival of a much-loved ritual might steer her thoughts towards happier times and the joy we had in one another. Christmas might bring home to her the prospect of appalling loneliness, the terror of which had pervaded her letters. What could she do? Continue in her job and live in a bed-sitter? Return to Denmark? Perhaps she had not really taken the consequences on board. Common sense might still prevail.

Christmas was wonderful. My best friend, James, wrote in his diary... 'Christmas Eve - the Scotts' Christmas party. Music and three glasses of sherry. Almond rice-pudding; duck and raisin stuffing, green peas and sweet potatoes; apple-cake with whipped cream, oranges, sweets and Kummel. Watched the candles on the Christmas tree burn out. Home after midnight.' Yes, that putting-together of a Danish-style Christmas in that year when the war ended concentrated Minna's mind wonderfully - though the duck should have been a goose.I knew that in her heart she was celebrating with her distant family across the North Sea - rolling back the years.

On New Year's Eve we used the last of the wine to toast each other and our hopes for 1946. We heard midnight chime from a distant chrch tower. On Wednesday, 1 January, 1946 I began work again. Nothing resolved, nothing, as yet, destroyed. Taking up the threads at the 'Life' was incredibly difficult. Procedures had changed, I was 'rusty', new subs saw me as a threat and were delighted when I displayed ignorance.

On one of my free days Minna told me that she had asked for indefinite unpaid sick-leave. She would go to Cheltenham to stay with a family known to Father Richard. There she would be instructed in the Faith by a local priest. Reason left me. Fury found outlet in hot words. She began to weep, rushed from the room and into her bedroom. I followed, seized her and shook her. Then I struck her in the face, twice. It was the first and last time I raised a hand to her.

I had a sudden revelation... we were a pair of bad actors in a play written by some stranger. No. There were two other persons in this room with our faces. Even the blows were theatrical. Playing to an invisible audience out there in the dark beyond our windows? The curtain would fall and we would grin, retire to the wings and kiss. Real life would resume. No. This was the second great watershed in our relationship - this first blow the antitheses of our first kiss.

Minna left towards the end of January. A kind of armed truce existed between us. She was not entirely easy about deserting me. Her departure left me feeling more isolated than in Africa or Italy. As I sat at home among the things we had gathered with love, I thought how often her Danish husband must have sat among that hand-made furniture he and Minna had designed together. We were both shipwrecked, cast ashore with all our possessions intact... and worthless. I re-read our letters and one, sent from Copenhagen in December 1935 seemed to mock me:

'When I say that I am afraid my happiness will not last, I am not doubting your love or mine. It is pangs of conscience. Not that I regret anything. Yes, one. That I ever married. But nothing about you and me. Our love is wild and free and clean and fierce, like the mountains where it began. My only trouble is Hervey. He is ill and I can only pity him. But sometimes I think: suppose somebody did to me what I am doing to him? That is my fear.'

Now, eleven years later, just before she left for Cheltenham, she had looked at me with those searching, candid eyes: 'I broke a promise and now I must pay for it.'

On 30 March 1946 my wife was received into the Roman Catholic Church. There was a concession. She might return to our home if we were prepared to live as 'brother and sister.' This was immediately rejected by our l parish priest who declared 'I don't care what has been decided at Cheltenham. That's not our diocese. I don't want you in my church.'

Soon afterwards we lost our home - our landlord wished to sell. He offered us a flat in Norwood, near the burned-out Crystal Palace. The winter of 1946-47 was appalling . We had electric light but no electric heating. Coal was rationed and what we burned was largely slate. We huddled innocently together in the same bed like children seeking animal warmth. When the thaw came the ceilings fell in and the lighting failed. After repairs had been done Minna found a job in a hospital on the other side of London. My mother moved in to 'do' for me..

This, I suppose is the end of a story under the 'Back Home' title. But I ask permission for an addendum.

* * * * *

I am now 91 and almost blind. Not blind enough, however, to visit Minna's grave and see the words 'May You Be As Happy As We.' carved below our intertwined initials. Happy? We? How?

When all the anger had died we still loved each other. There was one way for us to come together, one way to satisfy Minna's uneasy conscience. We could appeal to the Pope for Minna's Danish marriage to be annulled. To the sceptic this must seem the ultimate sophistry. Not for a Catholic. Such appals are rarely granted. The grounds for a 'dispensation' are extremely narrow. Minna's appeal could succeed on only one of them..

First step was to submit her 'case' to the Southwark Diocese. Archbishop Amigo was no friend to people like us. He was a hard-liner. A year passed before he even acknowledged receipt of the appeal. When he died things moved a little. Minna was cross-examined in the most intimate detail about her relationship with Hervey. 'I could not understand some of the strange questions they asked me' she told me years later. (Jeanne d'Arc had always been my favourite historical lady). Then the Danish bishop had to make his own enquiry. Another wait before we knew that the papers had gone to Rome.

On February 1, 1951 we were granted a 'special dispensation' by 'His Holiness Pope Pius XII'. We were as stunned by the good news as if it had been bad.

I remember my first words: 'Minna, my dear. Will you marry me?'

'Oh Len! Yes! Yes!'

'It will be your birthday in less than a week,' I said, 'WHAT a present!'

We were 'properly' married on 17 February 1951. Did this seeming 'miracle' reconcile me to Roman Catholicism?. No. I was cynical about miracles (see Miracle in Algiers - A3595502) The miracle was that two people had survived ten years of absence, frustration and anger without destroying each other. We had survived because our love was stronger than sexuality. We were to have 47 years of joy in each other and in our son Allan, born in December 1952. There were divisions - Minna's mind contained areas closed to me. After her death in March 1999 I wrote our story: 'A Danish Wife'. Most of the material on this web-site is taken from this as yet unpublished work.

A real miracle came when I least expected it. I do not wish to enlarge upon it here. It convinced me that deep down beneath all the showy pomp there is a hard, irreducible kernel of eternal truth. I became a practising Catholic. Practising is a good word. Practicing is better. I need a deal more practice before traditional Catholics will recognise me... because I see nothing wrong with condoms, married priests and the ordination of women. Graham Greene described himself as 'a sort of Catholic'. I am such a one but doubt if I am the right 'sort'.

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