WWTBAM Bored

The newly-weds caused a scandal in Baghdad when they appeared at a fancy-dress ball as Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas. The Pitt-Riverses then went to live in Andalucia, where Julian began fieldwork for his first book, People of the Sierra (1954). Pauline, a natural linguist, never forgot the compliment a man in a Spanish café paid her, when he asked her to give him one of her eyelashes, so that he might make her a belt with it.

She used to say, of her three husbands, that she had married first a head, then a body, then a head with a body. The Rumbolds bought the Old Rectory at Stinsford, where Thomas Hardy's heart lies in the grave of his first wife, and Pauline enjoyed showing friends the larder, where the great poet's heart had waited, overnight, to be buried.