Guli's Death

However it was not to be for on the very day I was due to start my job, and while Barbara unhappily was in Paris having a hard-earned weeks holiday our mother had a final devastating coronary, and dropped dead after breakfast [Guli died on 29 June 1955 ]. 

I remember the horror of it. It was supposed to be the day I was starting work at Taunton, everyone was away from the house except Daddy and me, and the mentally retarded cleaning girl, and we had to dial 999 for the ambulance. Robin had to be sent for from his posting abroad on a minesweeper, and the whole family had to assemble for a very sad funeral. Poor Barbara had to come back from France after only a few days of her holiday, absolutely devastated, as indeed we all were. 

I put off my job at Taunton for a month in order to stay at home and help out, not least with trying to make some sort of arrangements for the house to go on, and our father to continue living in it. This was finally resolved by my starting work at Taunton a month late, Robin returning to the Navy, and Barbara staying on and taking a job in Bristol, to companionate Daddy for the first eighteen months of his bereavement. 

At the end of that time she got a job in Tanganyika, and for the next nine and a half years or so worked in Africa, first in Uganda, and then in Tanganyika.