A Sort of Life Read Free

on his knowledge of men. “What do you mean?” said Lloyd George. “Well,” I said, “Winston has the wisdom to choose for a much bigger job the man you dismissed from the Admiralty”.’
    My uncle lived in a big house at Harston in Cambridgeshire, and as children we would go there for the summer holidays, though later my elders went away to the Lake District to climb and I was left with my mother and the baby Hugh. (Finally my sister Molly fell off a mountain and got married to the man who photographed her fall – perhaps she admired his presence of mind.)
    Harston House was – at least in part – a lovely William-and-Mary house, and it had a large old-fashioned garden very suited to hide-and-seek, with an orchard, a stream and a big pond containing an island, and there was a fountain on the front lawn. We would fix a cup to the handle of a walking stick, and the water so obtained tasted very cold and very pure. The fountain was about two feet deep and a yard across. Once my elder brother Raymond fell in at the age of three, and when asked how he had got out he replied with bravura, ‘I struck out for the shore.’ The smell of apples seemed to fall everywhere over the garden and the smell of box hedges, and there was a buzz of bees in the hot summer weather. I remember the funeral of a dead bird which was coffined in a Price’s night-light box. My elders, Herbert and Molly and Raymond, buried him in what was called the Shady Walk. I was only a minor mourner, being the youngest, too young and unimportant to be priest or grave-digger or chorister.
    My uncle was never there when we were. He stayed safely away from any family turbulence in his bachelor flat off Hanover Square. I had a very possessive feeling for the great rambling garden, and I was furious one year when my mother invited another small boy called Harker, the son of the school doctor, toshare my summer there. I treated him as a pariah, I wouldn’t play with him, I would hardly speak to him. I never showed him how to get water from the fountain, and I knew hiding places that he would never find, so that he was left ambling aimlessly without a companion, bored sometimes to tears. The experience of that terrible long August was never repeated and thereafter I was allowed to stay alone.
    It was at Harston I quite suddenly found that I could read – the book was Dixon Brett, Detective . I didn’t want anyone to know of my. discovery, so I read only in secret, in a remote attic, but my mother must have spotted what I was at all the same, for she gave me Ballantyne’s Coral Island for the train journey home – always an interminable journey with the long wait between trains at Bletchley. I still wouldn’t admit my new talent, and I stared at the only illustration all the way to the junction. No wonder it so impressed itself on my memory that I can see with my mind’s eye today the group of children posed on the rocks. I think I feared that reading represented the entrance to the Preparatory School (I went through the grim portal a few weeks before my eighth birthday), or perhaps I disliked the sense of patronage which I always detected when I was praised for something others did quite naturally. Only a few years ago at an Edinburgh ceremonial my memory was confirmed by Doctor Dover Wilson, the Shakespearian scholar, who told me that my parents often spoke to him of the difficulty they found in teaching me to read. I detested that absurd book with the engravings which now seem so charming, Reading Without Tears . How could I be interested in a cat who sat on a mat? I couldn’t identify with a cat. Dixon Brett was quite another matter, and he had a boy assistant, who might easily I thought, have been myself.
    I particularly resented my father’s interest. How could a grown man, I argued, feel any concern for what happened on a child’s walk? To be praised was agony – I would crawl immediately under the nearest table. Until I had grown up I think my