Today is the 14th, a Thursday. Another month has passed and the first year of another decade has passed. I am in London at Leighton Mansions where I’ve been for a week and a half looking for work. It isn’t easy. Linda has a nannying job over in Notting Hill, about 15 minutes drive away. 

I was hoping to find work here in London and move into the flat here. But, as a second option, I placed an advert in the Farmer’s Weekly for tractor driving during the upcoming harvest and today I had a reply that sounds promising. So, it looks like I will be spending the summer driving tractors².

After spending a few days more with the nurses in their flat in Camberwell, we went down to Cortington Manor to stay for the weekend. Diana [the Duchess of Newcastle] offered me a job putting a new ceiling in her stables and so we stayed on there all week and I earned £150-00. After that, we went up to Norfolk and stayed with Heather Stevens whom we had met at John and Sally Blakiston’s before we went to Europe. We thought that we might’ve found farm work in Norfolk, or some kind of work in Norwich, but there was nothing going so we returned to London.

Before we left Norfolk, we went for a day trip around the county and called to see Brad White’s¹ parents in Thurne, a tiny village deep in the Norfolk Broads. He was very pleased to see us and gave us Brad’s address in Darwin where he is now living.

So, we returned to London. Linda got her nannying job almost immediately and I am still looking. Something will turn up. It always does.

¹Followers of this story may remember Brad from my days working at The Fitzroy Hotel in Melbourne back at the very beginning of our adventures. 

²As it turned out, I spent the summer driving tractors for the harvest at Knoll Farm, near the town of Fordingbridge in Hampshire.