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remember very much about the row. My parents were good and kind but they were not mechanical, and it was difficult for them to understand that I was not telling a lot more lies when I told them I had spent most of my time in the Science Museum with the machines. They acted very wisely, because they did not send me back to Hammersmith. Instead, they sent me to live with friends at Oxford to go as a day boy to the Dragon School, then known simply as Lynams’ after the headmaster. So began an association with Oxford which has been, perhaps, one of the happiest and most formative influences of my life.
    The masters at Lynams’, I found, were all like Mr. Coxor even better. True, if you were lazy or unreasonably stupid you got hauled over the desk there and then and spanked with the form master’s hard hand till you blubbered, while the rest of the class looked on quaking in their shoes. That didn’t seem to matter, because I cannot remember any master in that school who did not inspire in me devotion and affection and respect, though of course ribald stories and nicknames for them were the rule. The headmaster was like nobody that I had ever seen or read about before.
    C. C. Lynam had started the school with his brother in the nineties as a co-educational preparatory day school for the children of university dons. As it grew in popularity boarders became a part of the set-up and the co-educational aspect of it faded; when I was there there were about a hundred and twenty boys, half of whom were boarders, and about ten little girls. The success of the school in scholarship was phenomenal—I remember four Winchester scholarships in one year—partly no doubt owing to the hereditary ability of many of the children. The headmaster was known to everybody as The Skipper because yacht cruising was his passion; he was a big, red-faced, laughing man with white hair that was seldom cut and curled about his ears. His brother would have liked to abandon the co-educational aspect of the school but The Skipper would have none of that, for the simple and elemental reason that he liked little girls. He said that they were a civilising influence in a boys’ school and I think there was some truth in that, because Lynams’ was certainly a delightful school for the boys. I do not think that I can pay the school a higher tribute than to say that my stammer hardly mattered there.
    The list of the boys who have attained distinction from that school would be endless, and of the little girls who shared my classes I remember best, perhaps, NaomiHaldane, who as Naomi Mitchison turned into a well known novelist and writer upon social matters, and Norah Joliffe, a soft-spoken, shy, pretty little girl in my form who walked off with every kind of academic distinction and went straight on to become a don at Cambridge, dying before she was fifty. There can be little doubt that The Skipper had good material to work with in his pupils, but I think the main credit for the happiness of the school must go entirely to the headmaster himself.
    As I have said, he was a very keen yachtsman. He had a succession of three or four sailing yachts that he called the
Blue Dragon
, in which he used to cruise around the north of Scotland, the Hebrides, the Orkneys and the Shetlands, during the Easter and the summer holidays. Towards the end of my time at the school he took a term off and sailed his boat across to Norway and up the coast to the North Cape. He was therefore a man accustomed to hardships and to risking his life in a mild way, unlike many schoolmasters. If I have learned one thing in my fifty-four years, it is that it is very good for the character to engage in sports which put your life in danger from time to time. It breeds a saneness in dealing with day to day trivialities which probably cannot be got in any other way, and a habit of quick decisions.
    I lived with friends and went as a day boy to this pleasant school. Mr. Sturt was a don at Queen’s and my