In The Fire Portrait, twenty-year-old Frances Whittington finds herself in a tricky situation. The financial Crash of 1929/30 has decimated her family's fortune, the young man who was keen on her has backed off, and her parents will struggle to support her if she fails to marry. Frances is an artist but, as yet, her art is not a viable career.
So what to do?
Bravery is required...
Have you ever seized a dream? she writes in her diary.
And is it wrong - unseemly - to turn a crisis into an opportunity?
For Frances had not been particularly keen to settle down with the young man who has now abandoned her! Why not seek a fresh start abroad? An elderly aunt in Cape Town might welcome a companion... When Frances tells her parents of her desire to emigrate to South Africa, her mother is horrified. But she gives grudging consent when Frances suggests that her prospects of snaring a husband will be better at the Cape, where no-one will know of her reduced circumstances. Her father sees the logic, buys her a brass-cornered trunk, a one-way ticket on a Union Castle liner, and lines up a Scottish missionary and his wife to act as chaperones on the voyage. Her mother throws herself into the gathering of a modest wardrobe: light dresses and a wrap to protect from sea breezes, hats of varying brim sizes to repel the ferocity of the elements and two pairs of silk stocking to be reserved for dinner at the Captain's table should Frances be so fortunate as to be chosen, or for the horse races in Cape Town should she be invited some day. The Vicar counsels against temptation by false prophets in an alien land.
I leaned on the ship's rail and laughed out loud at the irony of a young woman setting out on a journey she would never have undertaken if her father had retained his fortune.
Southampton faded to a smudge on the horizon.
A coal barge chugged past in the opposite direction and a crewman waved.
I waved back.
The air blew against my cheek, and I fancied I smelt the first heady scent of freedom.
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