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parents had met them on some holiday in Cornwall; they had a house immediately beside the school. The Sturts lived well enough but they were not particularly affluent and I imagine they were glad to have me as a paying guest to go to school with their son Oliver; for me the benefit was great. The Sturts had three children and lived a free and easy life; the summer was one long carnival of swimming or diving or boating, in punts or canoes upon the river Cherwell which runs past the school or in rowing boats orsailing dinghies upon the Upper River, the Thames above the city of Oxford. I mastered all these crafts before I was fourteen, and fished for the first time in my life, for the fat chub that nosed around the boathouse piles and could be seen sniffing at the worm if you kept very still, or for roach in the Thames.
    With all these country pleasures I cannot remember any great mechanical interests at Lynams’ except the motor bikes of the masters. Motor bicycles at that time, in 1911 and 1912, were novelties, somewhat experimental and entirely fascinating. Most of the masters had a motor bicycle and The Skipper had a little car built up of motor bicycle components, then known as a cyclecar. All these vehicles were continually in trouble and I used to spend hours at the shed door that we were not allowed to enter, watching the masters as they mended punctures or fiddled uncertainly with an engine that refused to start. In Oxford itself there was a fascinating place in Longwall Street, a garage run by a young man called Morris who built light cars made out of bought components in a window of the garage, so that you could see the car actually being made. They said that he was making them at the rate of nearly one a week, fitted with White and Poppe engines. Later on he made them quicker than that.
    Those were the amusements of the term time; in comparison my holidays in my suburban home were almost dull. Our summer holiday task at Lynams’ was to keep a diary, and the high spot of my diary for the summer of 1911 was the first Air Race round Britain, which passed directly over our house on the first lap between Brooklands and Hendon. The little boy who was myself, of course, knew all the aeroplanes by sight and drew them in his diary, the Blériot which won the race, the Morane-Borel, the Deperdussin, and the Valkyrie, names practically forgotten now. I remember particularly the Etrich monoplane, a gracefulthing for those days with swept, birdlike wings, that flew over last of all late on a summer evening; it was powered by an immensely powerful motor of 120 horsepower, more than twice the power of most of the other machines, and alone of all the competitors it carried a passenger. Later on, in the early days of the first war, we were to become familiar with a development of this machine as the German
Taube
.
    In the year 1912 a great change came into our lives, for my father accepted the job of Secretary to the Post Office in Ireland, which meant that he became King of the Post Office in that country. It was not promotion because the salary was the same as he had been getting in London, and in view of his increasing deafness it may be that he was being shunted into a dead end. He was glad to take the job, however, for a variety of reasons. My mother’s health was causing him anxiety; I think he felt that the change to new and more social surroundings from the somewhat humdrum life of a London suburb would help her by creating new interests, and perhaps he felt pleasure himself in the idea of being in complete control of a considerable enterprise, though in a smaller sphere. I should have felt like that myself in his position; life in London has never attracted me very much. To live beside great people and among great affairs is stimulating for a time when you are young. But when you have met a fair selection of the great people, when you have had the great affairs, I think a man of only average ability finds more solid