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story carelessly destroyed, but my elder brother cannot remember him even mentioning the matter, nor was the gardener sacked.
    Through a gateway by the smaller greenhouse one passed to the croquet lawn, where at the far end were apple trees and a revolving shelter which figured in my first truancy. I don’t clearly remember whether it was at this period I tried very hard to kill my brother Raymond by hitting him over the head with a croquet mallet, but I think this violent outbreak came later when I shared a room with him and we woke every morning to a quarrel. Now I shared a room uncomfortably with the baby Hugh, who cried at night and kept me awake.
    Walking across the croquet lawn (what a vast estate the whole place seems to me now, when I live, like most of my contemporaries, an apartment-life between bedroom and sitting-room), one came to a wooden fence which separated it from the kitchen-garden and a forest of raspberry and loganberry canes. Sometimes, but not often, we were allowed to pick from them and eat, and I preferred the winy flavour of the large loganberries. Beyond the kitchen-garden, on the right, was the entrance to the school quad, and on the left were the stables, which in those days contained no car, not even a horse, only one donkey called Miranda (she was employed in taking the washing to the laundry), and the cottage of the gardener, Charge. Beyond this cottage and behind yet another wall my father had built the School House sanatorium and near there, in a second kitchen-garden, we children were given small allotments of our own to tend – perhaps six feet square. (I can only remember growing radishes.) My only other gardening activity was to collect snails in a bucket and pour salt on them, so that they exploded into foam. (I was paid so much ahundred for their corpses.) I think I was rather older when I was paid a penny a dozen for killing cabbage-white butterflies with a tennis-racket. This seemed to me a very fine sport, and I can sympathize with the interest the Chinese feel when encouraged to kill flies at sight. 1
    The School House stood in the street called Castle Street which ran down to the canal. On the opposite side were rather inferior shops, not up to the High Street standard: a sweet-shop (one had to climb steps to enter it) where we bought the mineral waters for our manoeuvres; a jeweller’s called Bailey’s (an old man with a white beard sat perpetually behind the window with a magnifying glass in his eye mending watches and when they read to me about Moses and the Tablets of the Law, I always thought of him); a stationer’s and a pawnbroker’s where I once tried to pawn a broken cricket-bat but the broker wouldn’t accept it.
    I had splintered the bat in a clandestine game, beating in bushes near the canal for a lost ball, and I didn’t want anyone at home to see the condition it was in. At some stage between eight and ten I had made friends with two or three town boys of what was called then the working-class, and one summer I used to meet them in secret near some rubbish dumps beside the canal. I would bring a bat and a cricket-ball, neither of which they possessed. (Cricket, even in the preparatory school, was still a game: it only became a sport and therefore feared in the senior school.)
    This is one of a few memories which remain to me suggesting some social conditioning. Why otherwise should the meetings have remained secret? There were others. During the 1914 war an old woman lived in Castle Street who prepared tripe, and I was given the idea that this was a far lower occupation than a butcher’s – it was ‘untouchable’, though we frequently ate her tripe with white onion sauce. My mother was deeply offended because the tripe-seller’s daughter married an officer in the Inns of Court O.T.C. , which was stationed for a while in the town (the Corps was regarded by the citizens with some pride because it was not an ordinary regiment – every man was a potential