When the local photographer, Francis Harrow, introduced a new method of exposing photographs and was looking for a model, he asked Linda, the daughter of John and Annabel Ripley. John was nearly as flattered as Linda was herself, but Annabel erupted with fury, because she did not have an insecure artist’s life in mind for her beautiful daughter’s future. She only agreed after having seen the artistically responsible result, then she even had a photograph of herself made.

She was only just rescued from such a life herself by John when she hung around the slums of London as a precocious orphan and he offered to buy her a pint of bitter in a harbour side pub. She fell in love there and then and was willing to follow him wherever he went. And that was Bridbury. Here in that beautiful house, she couldn’t be happier, even if she does occasionally miss the freedom, the adventure and the excitement. But she usually suppresses these feelings quickly, especially on Sundays when she sings psalms alongside Lucy Barnet of the bookshop and Annie Brent of the clothes shop, in father Jessy Anthony Green’s church.

Then she feels as if she belongs completely, because there is no one in the town who is familiar with her past. John is a good man, who earns his money with a big shipping company in Hull where he plans faraway voyages and coordinates the purchasing and selling of overseas goods. On Wednesdays they eat in restaurant Eating Time of Mary Sutton and treat themselves to the delicious puddings of her son Randy. And on Sunday they go out riding on their own horses, sometimes with Linda on her Exmoor Pony and are then often gone the whole day long. That is very different from the dirt of the big city!