Eleanor had left Scotland in a tangled trail of purple silk, fishnet stockings and high-heeled shoes. She was seventeen. She went to Oxford and fell asleep in her finals. A local newspaper printed a picture of her slumbering under the headline ‘A Sleeping Beauty’. Lurking with a hangover in Blackwell’s bookshop, she picked up a volume of poetry by Patrick Lincoln; it froze her spine and she fell in love. She moved to London and took a job as a waitress in Lyons Corner House, and then another, folding scarves in Liberty’s. It was 1962 and she had never seen anyone rock and roll and had only watched television once, when her father had borrowed a set to see the Queen’s coronation. In her dreary bedsit Eleanor made tea by heating water on an iron. She did not know how to boil an egg or slice a loaf of bread; she became very thin and returned to Scotland for a while with a beehive hair-do and a lot of fanciful notions about poets.