Maggie and I both love to build things and were forever taking on projects. The first was a thatched, rickety, delicious old house called Peregrine House, in Enborne, which Maggie found and informed me we were going to buy. We viewed it on a wet day in spring, standing at the end of the garden under an umbrella and, looking back at the house, decided it would be ours.
As a practical man, I started on the wiring and managed to put my foot through the ceiling on my first visit. I quickly decided that I should go back to electronics and leave this work to the professionals. We stayed at Peregrine House for years and lived there through the 1968 flu epidemic that nearly carried Maggie off and which I barely survived. We were thirty years old and stayed put for ten years, by which time the businesses I had created were running successfully.
