may have obstructed your view. Anyway he succeeded.’
2 I think this encounter must have been during the Christmas holidays of 1897–8 when his friend Bosie had departed and Wilde wrote of ‘ill-health, loneliness and general ennui with a tragi-comedy of an existence’.
3 I think my decision was the right one. This is how my brother Raymond, who was ten, described the great day; ‘We got up at 4.15 in the morning and had breakfast. At Euston we took a cab and drove to Trafalgar Square. Then we couldn’t go on as it was such a crowd, but at last we got to the Admiralty. We waited about two hours and then the procession came by. Soldiers first, then the state carriages with dukes in ermine with coronets. Then more soldiers and state carriages and then the Royal coach and the King with his crown on. Then came more soldiers etc. After dinner it came by again and just as the crown was put on the King’s head, the street lamps lighted, 41 guns fired and then we came home and we were awfully tired’. Oh, the fatigues of childhood never to be equalled till old age.
4 The fear of bats remains. I had to steel myself later in Angkor Wat to pass a damaged bat flapping on the floor of a passage, while up in the pineapple towers one could see small men on ropes gathering the bats’ dung. In those days there were Vietminh ambushes around Angkor, but I would have preferred an ambush to that dying bat.
Chapter 2
1
S OME time in 1910, when my father became headmaster, we removed from St John’s (down the road into the High Street, turn left into Castle Street by the Norman church) to the School House, and that remained our home until my father’s retirement in the twenties. The new things which most impressed me were the long path from the street to the front door, on the right the red-brick Tudor school hall and on the left, divided from me only by a flower-bed, the old disused churchyard. There was a white cat which used to sit on the tombstones and it was said by my father to be the ghost of a notorious absentee headmaster in the eighteenth century. When I was sixteen I sat on a gravestone with Peter Quennell and we both read aloud to each other from The Yellow Book with a sense of daring and decadence.
At the end of the long path, beyond the house, one reached the tennis-court, and beside the tennis-court was a small flower-garden with a pond full of tadpoles, and a buddleia which in summer swarmed with peacock butterflies. One of my early memories is of catching near the buddleia a female orange-tip which they told me was a very rare specimen, much rarer than the male. After I caught a butterfly I would put it in a poison-bottle, but a scruple always inhibited me from pinning it out in a case as my elders did, so the corpses soon became brittle and from frequent examination fell to powder, and then I threw them away. I wasn’t scared of butterflies, but I was deeply afraid of moths – something about their hairy bodies terrified me. I fear them still and I am unhappy with one in the room until I have killed it. Beyond the buddleias lay two greenhouses at right-angles: in the small one were only pot-plants, geraniums and the like, but in the larger were plants of importance, orchids, which my father brought back from sales in London, and green grapes, and there was a deckchair in which my father at leisure moments would sit smoking a pipe and blowing smoke over the grapes tokill greenflies. There were very strict rules about never leaving a door open. I had the impression that the least drop in temperature brought instant death, and indeed I was not far from the truth. Once the gardener, who had the misleadingly responsible name of Charge, got tight and forgot to stoke the stove in the orchid house. All the orchids died including one for which my father had refused three hundred pounds – the equivalent of several thousand pounds today. It must have been a severe blow as it would be for me to have the manuscript of a