The church was decked with flowers – again.

I tried to tell her story.

LIke my own mother, Harriet was born in what was then part of the Indian Raj, a place that is now in Pakistan.

Her father was shot by a sniper in the Khyber Pass during the 1914-18 war. He had been in China, having trained as an army intelligence officer, but had lately returned to his unit.

Her mother, Una, still young, vivacious and beautiful, soon married again.

Eventually they returned to England and settled in the country. Una’s second husband died soon after.

He had been modestly wealthy and they had bought a big house.

When Una died, Harriet inherited the house and lived there until she went into the retirement home in 2005.

It was there, too, that I got to know her, first, as my mother’s best friend, then, after my mother’s death, as someone who had been a big part of my childhood and was always interested in what I was doing and always seemed pleased to see me.

Something happened in that house that I always liked to think about.

Fred, the gardener first told me about the evacuees who were sent down from the East End of London in the war.

Later, one of them, Walter Sparks, wrote a little memoir which he sent to Harriet.

It describes how the little family of four children was put on a train not knowing where they were going, and then driven in a coach to a village hall with other children, who, one by one, were picked up and taken away but no-one seemed to want this little family.

Then someone made a phone call and a little later a man and a woman, very smartly dressed, came in, and sort of looked them over and nodded and they were all taken out to a big car and driven up a long drive until they saw a big house and realised they had been brought to a mansion.

The man was Fred, the gardener, who doubled as chauffeur.

There they spent the next two years, where they were looked after by the servants and by Harriet and by Fred, who would drive them to the cinema.

This house is where my mother and father met at a tennis party. My father was a relative of Una’s. My mother and Harriet became best friends and served together in the WAF.

My father and his friends used to drive golf balls into the park and pay a penny for each ball the children retrieved and ride them on their backs in the game where you try to make the other child fall off first.

Later Walter wrote how this experience had changed his life, had liberated him, because he saw into another world. He trained as an accountant and became successful, just like Fred’s son, who became a professor in America.

A great convulsion had occurred, with secondary shocks that travelled into everyone’s lives.

This afternoon, after the service was over, I went again and looked at the house down the old walnut avenue where only one or two trees still stand and thought of all that had passed there and of the happy calm days I had spent reading on the grass or exploring the big, old library. Other memories surged as I came away, my mother, my father, Fred, the lovely house of soft grey stone with its tennis court and its croquet lawn and a green bench under a plane tree.

Goodbye, Harriet.