in search, not in denial. The abandonment of one’s father’s faith is a deep fear and sorrow and I felt an outsider." Adult life Boston went up to Somerville College, Oxford, to read English in Autumn 1914, the first months of World War I. During her second term, she decided to leave college after her first year and go to war as a volunteer nurse. Her ambition was to get to France, where, as she put it, "it was all going on". Her brothers were all serving in the armed forces but they were a close family, and spent any leaves or spare time together. Boston's youngest brother Philip was reported missing in 1917 when his plane was shot down. In her memoir, Perverse and Foolish (1979), she gives an account of her war-time experiences. After training at St Thomas's Hospital in London and Addenbrooke's Hospital, Cambridge, she was posted to a casualty clearing station at Houlgate, Normandy. Lucy married her distant cousin Harold Boston in September 1917 in Woodstock, Oxfordshire. They lived at Norton Lodge, Norton, Cheshire, near Harold Boston's work as a director of the family tannery, and had one son, Peter Shakerley Boston, born in September 1918. Following the failure of the marriage in 1935 Lucy travelled in France, Italy, Austria and Hungary, visiting the musical capitals of Europe. She studied painting in Vienna and immersed herself in this for the next three or four years. Perverse and Foolish ends with her return to England in 1937, when she took rooms in Cambridge where her son, Peter, now aged 19, was an undergraduate. Hearing that a house was for sale in the nearby village of Hemingford Grey, Lucy remembered that in 1915 she had glimpsed from the river a seemingly derelict farmhouse. She jumped to the conclusion that this must be the house for sale, drove out to Hemingford Grey in a taxi, knocked at the door and announced to the owners that she would be interested in buying it. It transpired that they had only that morning decided to sell, and the house advertised for sale was a completely different one. Another autobiographical memoir, Memory in a House, describes her life after moving to Hemingford Grey, including the renovation and restoration of The Manor. This book, published before Perverse and Foolish and written when Boston was eighty-one, can be described as an extended love letter to