The Wye Valley – June 1955

‘If I’d realized that setting up house was as hellish as this, I’d have stayed in bloody Singapore!’

He staggered through the office door with a large cardboard box and dumped the heavy typewriter on a new desk, whose five-ply top creaked ominously.

‘Stop complaining, Richard! We’ve broken the back of it now.’

He stifled the obvious retort about breaking his own back and dropped into the swivel chair behind the desk, wiping the sweat from his face with a large khaki handkerchief. It was very warm and the confines of the Wye Valley seemed to hold in the summer heat, even though he should be used to it, having lived in the tropics for the past thirteen years. Looking across at Angela Bray, he almost resented how cool and fresh she looked in a yellow summer dress. His business partner sat at a table, checking lists of laboratory equipment, ticking off delivery notes against her own inventory of what they needed. The rest of the room and the one next door, which was to be their main laboratory, were piled with crates and cardboard boxes, most carrying labels bearing the name of suppliers in Cardiff and Bristol.

‘All we need now are some clients, or it’ll soon be overdraft time!’ he muttered, thinking of their rapidly dwindling bank balance.

Angela slapped down her pencil and glared at Richard Pryor. ‘Come on, Richard, the coroner has promised you regular post-mortems in Chepstow and Monmouth. And you’ve got those medical school lectures in Bristol, so that’s a good start. We agreed that it would take us at least a year to break even.’

Her level-headed pragmatism was a counterpoint to his swinging moods, for she was always calm and self-possessed whatever the crisis. Pryor sometimes thought of her as the ‘ice maiden’, except that the thick mane of brown hair that framed her handsome face was hardly that of some Nordic beauty.