This is a story of events as seen and experienced by a private individual during the greater part of the twentieth century. Ground covered: a child in Essex during WWI; convent school in France; encounters with a parent disabled in the war; universities, Sorbonne, Oxford; love story; personal successes; WWII; private war effort, in Berlin for the duration; Control Commission; the postwar bulge; a diplomatic post; change over to an anonymous commitment; Africa, 1960-61, the Ethiopian attempted coup d'etat; Ghana, Sudan; Central Europe, Prague, 20 August 1968; Soviet Union; the Helsinki Agreement, CSCE; Belgrade, Madrid, Stockholm. The manuscript closes in the last decade of the twentieth century. It could, the author wrote, have gone on for further chapters if found too short."