George Lloyd writes: "In the autumn of 1945, after some three and a half years of illness, my wife and I were able to travel to Switzerland where we lived at her home in the mountains. There, with much difficulty, I wrote my Fourth Symphony. During the spring of 1947 we moved to Corceleettes, on the Lake of Neuchâtel. By the edge of the lake we found two rooms on top of a barn to live in; alongside was a room where I could work, and there I wrote a large part of my Fifth Symphony. The summer was wonderful, the hottest in living memory; day after day the sun poured down. I was beginning to write more easily and to think a little more clearly. The five months we spent by the lake were probably the happiest of our lives and I believe something of that got into what I was writing."