According to journalist Mick Brown, "She attributes her flight from convention to her first love, Tony Irvine, an RAF pilot with whom she fell in love at the age of 15, and who was blessed, she says, 'with a very open approach to life.'" The failure of her relationship with Irvine (referred to as Paul in "Instead of a Letter"), her "great love", "blighted" many years: "My affairs after that, I kept them trivial if I possibly could. I was frightened of intensity, because I knew I was going to be hurt." Irvine went to war in Egypt, and eventually stopped replying to Athill's letters, then two years later requested an end to their engagement. At age 43, Athill suffered a miscarriage.