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family church at Bisterne. They returned to Egypt, but the following year Margery was back in England awaiting the birth of her first child. A son, Francis, was born on the morning of Wednesday 16 July. Her diary records events: Thursday was a ‘bad day’. The baby was quickly baptised on Friday and the same afternoon he ‘left us’. Margery and Tom buried Francis in the churchyard at Bisterne and she wrote nothing in her diary until eleven days later, when the entry simply reads: ‘Downstairs pm’. She could put no words to her grief.
    For the next seven years Margery and Tom Dray lived in Alexandria or Cairo, travelling in the Middle East and to Cyprus, where Tom’s father and two of his sisters had retired. When Margery, aged thirty-eight, became pregnant for the second time she returned to England for the confinement.
    Eve’s birth in August 1914 coincided with the outbreak of war in Europe. Restless, Tom returned to Egypt, where he was seconded to Political Intelligence with the rank of Captain, with both Sir Harry Chauvel and General Allenby later writing appreciatively of his services during the war. 9 Margery remained in England. Having lost one child, Margery took particular care with her second, recording Eve’s progress in detail in her diary. Perhaps she had cause for concern: at twelve months Eve would not crawl and she only began to walk unaided at eighteen months. She could be wilful and Margery wrote that she ‘has taken to screaming when she does not get what she wants’. 10
    After a little over a year Margery returned to Egypt with Eve and for the next four years the family lived in the fashionable Cairo suburb of Heliopolis in a large two-storey house, the Villa de Martino. Often alone, toddler Eve found companionship with cats and dogs and other animals. When the family moved to Boulaq Dakrur in the countryside outside Cairo, pigeons, rabbits—Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, and Peter—and sheep joined the household. There was a cat called Miss Mewkins and a puppy named Pickle. Her father’s horse was Trotsky. This period was one of the few times she lived with her father.
    At the end of the war, Tom Dray was promoted to Director of Administrative Services in the Survey of Egypt; the King awarded him the Order of the Nile (3rd Class) in 1924. 11 Now in his forties, Tom’s career was at its height, but his marriage had sunk to its lowest point. Margery and Eve, aged five, returned to England. Tom visited but was visibly bored and restless, and Margery’s mother was a hard wedge between them. 12 In her diary Margery records her sadness. In 1919, on her twelfth wedding anniversary she doubted that Tom would remember the day, and a year later she confessed: ‘it has come to this—that I daren’t remind him of our wedding anniversary because I feel he regrets it, and hates and despises me! ’ 13 Apart from one year in 1921, Margery and Eve spent every Christmas between 1919 and 1924 in England, without Tom.
    For much of her childhood Eve lived with her mother, grandmother and aunt at Lymington, a genteel tourist town on the south coast of England. Hers was a world of cloying feminine gentility ruled by an overbearing Grannie Mills in severe long black skirts. Almost every word was its diminutive—nannies, piggies, bunnies—and servants were simply Cook or Nurse. A dull household with little to leaven the discipline of obligation, whether religious or secular, although everyone was kind. 14
    Eve was the centre of interest for this clutch of women, who competed for her attention and spoiled her. Solitary and pampered, she never knew the rough and tumble of a life shared with siblings. She never had to compromise. She learned to do what was expected, handing around cakes and tea on social occasions, playing with children her grandmother approved of, learning to ride because her mother liked to hunt. Often alone, she escaped into