I mean, the thing we were wanting to do was to jump to the actual structure straight away from the crystal. And we were, when we had finished photographing this crystal, of course we had all the data that there was, but later on the same year, I think, this photography of the first sodium salt took place in February and I think it was somewhere about April that the potassium and rubidium salts were made for us by ICI, and sent also. And we photographed the whole of them also, and we built three-dimensional data from scratch.

[Q] And the significance of those, if they were going to help solve the phase problem and give you the electron density calculations in an interpretable distribution?

Yes, yes. In fact, of course, the three salts were not isomorphous. The potassium and rubidium salts were, and then the sodium salt was monoclinic, with a smaller unicell. And that determined a different course of action in its solution, but the obvious thing was to do Patterson's on all three, which we could calculate ourselves if we just did the two-dimensional ones, and place the heavy atoms, which we did for the potassium and rubidium, but not for the sodium ones from... I know... actually, if we'd held it all in our hands all the time, we probably should have, because the later potassium and rubidium salt positions. But, in fact, wanting to go faster to an actual analysis, I decided it would be good to use the X-ray microscope, and Charles Bunn had built one in his spare time in Alkali Division, Northwich.

And we took the children to a farm in the country, in the Easter vacation, so that I could go over to Charles and work with him in the evenings, and look after the family for the rest of the day. It was a quite serious moment of the war, we used to sort of look out at... every night. On the one side it was Manchester and towns over that side were being bombed and going up in flames from time to another, while the other side would be Stoke doing the same. And Thomas would go out lecturing every now and again to one part or the other, and he was officially fire-watching for Stoke, the other side. Once I went in with him to his lectures, and a bomb fell very near us, and everyone in his lecture class just dived under the table for the next few minutes, then we rather sheepishly got out again when we were obviously safe. And I was always sorry we hadn't actually gone down and helped those who were digging for people out of where the bomb had come down, because it had come down on Bob Stross, a friend of Thomas's, and he was half buried in debris.