When Cambridge graduate Nicholas Monsarrat arrived in Nottingham in 1932 to train as an articled clerk with the law firm of Acton, Marriot and Simpson, like many a promising young newcomer to the city, he found his way to ‘Edgmont’. There the rooms were lofty, boasted ‘ornamented ceilings and threatening chandeliers’ and were ‘comfortably carpeted on the ground floor … a little austere on the first and second’ and ‘frigid at the top’ where ‘the carpeting gave way to linoleum and worn boards’. It was everything anxious mothers hoped for: ‘respectability, strict rules, a certain esprit de corps, and an iron hand at the helm’ in the shape of a ‘strong-willed, capable and despotic no-nonsense English landlady’, Mrs Pierce, ‘part of the authentic backbone of England’ who gave ‘full value for money’. In return she expected ‘to be paid on the nail’.

Mrs Pierce was quite an old lady when Nicholas Monsarrat arrived. His description of her was formidable: ‘dressed in shiny black with lace trimmings, armoured about with a breast-plate of cameo brooches’ and ‘more than a match for any young whipper-snapper, just down from Cambridge, who might think himself too good for his new surroundings’.

Nicholas Monsarrat had graduated in 1931 from Trinity College, Cambridge, where he had been one of the inner-circle of scientist Victor Rothschild, and a friend of the novelist Malcolm Lowry whom he remembered as, ‘drunk by every noon and at the same time writing a hair-raising book which would lay bare all the wild life of the wicked world outside’.