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satisfaction in a smaller milieu. For most of us life is fuller and more satisfying when one is a big frog in a little puddle than when one is battling on as a little frog in a big puddle, and perhaps for this reason I have always preferred myself to live in the provinces rather than in London. Thinking back over the years, I rather think that the same motives may have taken my father to his job in Ireland.
    It meant great changes for my brother and myself. My father’s job in Ireland in those days carried a considerable social position which both he and my mother were well capable of maintaining; my father was a good classical scholar, the author of a number of books, and a very good host with a keen sense of humour. My mother was the daughter of a Major-General in the Indian Army and very well up in all the usages of polite society in those far-off days; there was little that she did not know about precedence, visiting cards, calling, and ‘at home’ days. Their social position in Ireland required a very different house from the modern villa in a row that we had lived in up till then, and my father leased an old rambling country house at Blackrock ten miles south of Dublin, a house with about thirteen acres of grounds, a large walled garden, good stables, and a long range of glass houses. In those days of cheap service he had no difficulty in staffing this house with three indoor servants, a gardener, and a gardener’s boy without overspending his salary even though my brother and I were at the most expensive stage of education. And here my father and mother blossomed out into the country house life that in those days was the reward that good and faithful servants of the King expected in their later years and on retirement. For two years until the first war they led a very happy life at South Hill near Blackrock. Though nobody knew it at the time, that sort of country house life was near its end for the majority of Englishmen, and I am glad my parents had that happiness while it was still there to enjoy.
    For Fred and myself, that house opened up new country pleasures we had hardly dreamed of. There was a pony to be ridden or driven in a trap, hay to be made and carted, greenhouses to be walked through in wonder. Fred had not got on very well at Rugby, which at that time was rather a tough school, I think; he had two abdominal operationswhile he was there and spent more time in the sanatorium than out of it. My father removed him when we went to Ireland and sent him to Trinity College at the early age of sixteen; he lived at home and went to Dublin every day. His room rapidly became filled with books. There was an exciting new poet called John Masefield writing about things that had never found a place in poetry before, so that the critics were saying scornfully that
Dauber
wasn’t really a poem at all. There was a terrific man called Algernon Blackwood writing mystical stories with a supernatural tinge, and there were the Pre-Raphaelites to be discovered, with
The Wood Beyond the World
and
The Water of the Wondrous Isles
, and presently there was Swinburne. Life was not all literature for Fred, though, because he acquired a very pretty little .22 seven-chambered revolver with which we both learned to shoot the weathercock with remarkable accuracy. I remember that little gun with pleasure even now, and wish I had it still.
    There were other excitements, too. In those two years before the first war our girl cousins from Cornwall came to stay with us more than once. Patty was about Fred’s age and was his confidante, and it was from her that I derived what little knowledge I possess about Geraldine Fitzgerald. I only met Geraldine once; she was one of those ravishingly beautiful young Irish girls with dark hair and a perfect complexion, who wanted to go on the stage. There is a Geraldine Fitzgerald in Hollywood who played magnificently opposite Bette Davis in
Dark Victory
years ago, and since has played the lead in many