26 October 2020
In the summer of 1923 the novelist Rumer Godden, then a girl of 15, came with her mother and three sisters to a hotel in the town of Château-Thierry, near the Great War battlefields of the Marne.
Their mother had grown irritated with the girls' "selfishness" back home in Eastbourne in southern England, and wanted them to learn a lesson in self-sacrifice by contemplating the cemeteries of war dead.
En route to Château-Thierry, however, the mother was taken ill with an infected horse-fly bite. Unable to move from her bed, she left the girls to shift for themselves.
