Barbara Young died on 15 May 2003. She was 93. She had never married and had no children. She did have a nephew, Ulick, and two nieces, Georgiana and Charmian. In clearing up her effects they came across a bundle of letters dating back to 1951 and written to her by George, the author’s father, who died in 1975.

They are love letters; with the strange, compelling force that such letters exercise, they drew together not just Barbara and George but her family, including her nephew and nieces.

On George’s side there was the author, then a schoolboy. He was deeply affected by his father’s experiences. Only half-comprehending what was happening at the time, he became the youthful witness of a passionate yet tormented love and of a life that was tearing itself apart. After youthful promise and a brilliant early career in the Royal Navy, George had come down to the level expressed in the book’s title.

The reassurance of needing to ‘fear no fall’ did not work. He did fear and he fell, again and again. His greatest fear was of losing Barbara. Yet for brief episodes, after his encounter with her, he experienced passionate love, though not immediately reciprocated, and it was always elusive.

Meanwhile, the tiny group of witnesses looked on, fearful of the fragility on which his life seemed to depend. They learned by experience not to expect much; yet they were moved by the transient moments of happiness in the intermittent life together of George and Barbara. This is an account of that love affair and of the recovery by the author of the full story, fifty years later.

Bruce Arnold

Bruce Arnold is the author of a group of four novels called The Coppinger Chronicle set in England in the 1940s and 1950s. He has written a number of biographies of politicians, Margaret Thatcher, Charles Haughey and Jack Lynch, three books on Irish artists, William Orpen, Jack Yeats and Mainie Jellett, and a life of Jonathan Swift. His two books on James Joyce’s novel, Ulysses, recount the legal battles that faced this controversial publication. He has just completed a life of the painter, Derek Hill.