One Saturday, between two and three decades ago, having told Jane that, as a treat, we would be spending Saturday night outside London, we drove west down the A40.  Late that afternoon, in a pub by the old Corn Exchange in High Wycombe, she started wondering where we were to spend the night. I fancied looking for somewhere outside town, I told her, and we headed farther west, in the direction of Oxford, along the straight road which the peasantry of the first Sir Francis Dashwood had modernised in the 18th century using chalk dug out from West Wycombe hill to create the warren of caves where the meetings of the notorious Hell Fire Club were held.

Halfway along the narrow West Wycombe high street is the George and Dragon, an inn contemporary with the Dashwoods’ imposing Palladian mansion. Saying ‘this looks nice, let’s see if they have a room’, I turned sharp left, using the entrance through which coaches would have come and gone in the old days. (click here for photographs).

‘Mr Vaughan-Rees is it?   We’ve got your room all ready’, said the woman at the bar, and we were shown up a quite imposing staircase, turning left along a narrow corridor whose right hand wall sloped at a rather alarming angle, into room 1, dominated by an imposing four-poster bed.

This year we both actually remembered that June the 11th is a date worth remembering, our wedding anniversary; and I went so far as to put a note in the diary to make sure that Jane kept yesterday and this morning free.  For I had decided that we would return to the George and Dragon and the village which we had both known as children, the village of the Hell Fire Caves, the haunted mausoleum and the Church on the Hill with its great golden ball.

Jane and I first met, as friends of friends, in 1969; and it was many years before we realised that we had spent much of our childhood and teenage years within a few miles of each other (though, as she is five years younger than me, we would not have had much reason to meet). But we both have memories of what, as children, we were allowed to do in West Wycombe.  And yesterday as, between showers, we walked up the hill, we recalled how much more freedom we had in those years.

We could wander at will through the gloom of the Hell Fire Caves, taking small torches or candles to light our way, pretending to be ghosts, vampires or other monsters, frightening the life out of each other. (Nowadays it’s all organised, guided and lit up, with an entrance fee of £5 for adults and £4 for children).

There was no fencing to stop people going inside the mausoleum to stare at the urns in their niches and read the inscriptions.

Best of all, we could not only climb the tower of St Lawrence Church (still allowed, once a week, for a fee); we could go higher still, up a rickety ladder into the golden ball itself.

But, despite the restrictions, it was still a great pleasure to revisit West Wycombe. Even more so to wander down the hill again, to the friendly bar of the George and Dragon for a pint of Marlow ale, drunk slowly while choosing what we would have for dinner.  As it turned out, my ribeye steak, and Jane’s liver and bacon were of good quality and cooked just as we specified.  And as we arrived in our room at the front of the hotel, with an even more welcoming four-poster bed than in the room where we had slept all those years before, we both agreed that it had been an excellent way to celebrate our 29th wedding anniversary.

Next year, for our 30th anniversary, I’m supposed to give my wife pearls. Thank goodness that Jane will be quite happy to settle for a dozen or so oysters.