I was an awkward teenager. I was very talented in art. I wanted to become a graphic designer which my son now is but I was told that there was no money to send girls to college and that I would go to secretarial school.

He was unwell, pale, struggling for breath, nauseous, dizzy and in pain from fibromyalgia. She let him have chocolate pudding for dessert and coffee following dinner.

We were both sun crazy. We would start sunbathing in March sitting with cardboard covered in tin foil and well oiled with iodine added to Johnson & Johnson baby oil in the back yard. We both paid a huge price.

I had the front room which used to be the parlor. I shared it with four others. One night I awoke to have someone undoing my pajamas. Another time one of the roommates tried to stab me with a pair of scissors.

Clive was outrageously gay. Absolutely outrageous. He and his lifetime partner, Howard Capes, met at an air show in Paris some ten years before. Howard was the PR director for Decca Navigator (the business side of Decca Records who had just turned down the Rolling Stones).

He became a ward of the Marists – a religious organization that ran an orphanage outside Edinburgh. His upbringing was strict and very dour to use the Scottish word. At 17 he was sent off to make his fortune.

Bill and I rented an enormous half western, half Japanese house in Azabu near the Azabu Hotel. It used to belong to the French tutor of the now-dead Empress. Our landlady was Miss Kawai who had lost her fiancé in the Philippines in WWII.

He was their in-house counsel. He was married at the time; his wife and six year old daughter lived in Paris. This was during the US Government vs. IBM case.

Shortly after our return to London we moved to Frankfurt. I was not all that happy there but we made the most of it. I quickly got a job with the US Army in the I.G. Farbin Building, at the time the largest building in Europe.

Our whole goal was to leave England. We were very anti-England; for young people, the hangover of WWII was very depressing. Constantly having no money was very depressing.

This is the only letter that my father wrote to me in his lifetime.

He turned the key in the door of the apartment to find when he entered that it was totally empty. Not even a chair to sit on. His wife had left him.

We were intermittently struck by earthquakes. In fact, in Tokyo there are many a day but you might not feel them. Anyway the building would roll and rattle and we would decide whether to stay put or leave.

He would report to a German man who liked to drink and as did my father, they would spend evenings reminiscing about the war. We had found a house in Riverside to rent. It was very spartan.

They tried to remain in England. We moved to Wales, to Anglesey. We lived in a gypsy caravan complete with a tarpaper roof and little tin smokestack connected to a kerosene stove which they rented from Farmer Roberts who had a working farm and thirteen children.