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officer as well as a potential barrister).
    In the Junior School, which I entered about ten, I became aware too of the stigma attached to those who were ‘train boys’. A day-boy was as respectable as a boarder, but a train-boy was not. (Claud Cockburn, who lived at Tring only a few miles away, avoided the stigma because he was sent as a boarder to my father’s School House.) The idea was fostered by many of the masters. Train-boys were regarded as dirty (no wonder, after half an hour on the L.N.W.R. burning war-time fuel), and the fact that many were aided by L.C.C. grants was held against them too. At a later date my father, who unlike my mother was quite without social prejudice, tried to remove the stigma by giving them a house and a housemaster and calling them Adders, but it was not a very helpful choice of name. It needed moral courage to be friends with a ‘train bug’, as they were called, but I can’t remember any feeling stronger than a certain illicit toleration which I felt towards the dirtiest of the lot. He was once caned in public in my form room by my father for some offence which was never made clear to any of us, but we were accustomed at that age to the moral confusion of adults and we didn’t trouble to ask him the reason.
    Though my father was completely free from social snobbery I noticed a certain exaggerated interest in royalty which was exhibited by my mother and by the aunts who were temporarily in waiting around her, and I was obscurely irritated; it seemed to lower our family pride, though I was ready enough to accept the glamour of royalty in fiction, in the imaginary world of Ruritania and Kravonia.
    I slept at first in the same room as Hugh, who for a long period, it seems to me now, made me pass hours of sleeplessness with his crying. When I went to bed, I had to creep by a kind of branch line on the main staircase that ran steeply up to my mother’s private lavatory, which lay in a tower over the terrace at one end of the school quad. My father never used this lavatory, I think,but the children sometimes did, and at night this narrow climbing stair on the way to bed was the point of terror: anything might lurk there in ambush.
    I shared my bed with a multitude of soft animals of which I can remember a teddy bear (the most loved), a glove bear (it came second in my affection because it could not stand alone), and a blue plush bird (it was the age of Maeterlinck). I kept the bird, I think, only for the sake of filling the bed, because I disliked the feel of plush and I have mentioned my terror of birds. When quiet had fallen on the house, the fear of fire would emerge like smoke and I would imagine I had been deserted by all my family. I would drop the teddy bear out of bed and shout for the nurse or nursery-maid to pick it up. When one of them came, I felt assured again that all was normal, and I could sleep, though once I remember getting out of bed and sitting on the top of the stairs in order that I might hear the voices from the dining-room below, the low comforting drone of dull adult conversation which told me that the house was not yet ablaze.
    My favourite toys in those days were a clockwork train and lead soldiers. When the soldiers had lost too many limbs to stand up we melted them down in a frying-pan over the nursery fire and dropped them into cold water as people do now in Sweden on New Year’s night, seeking omens of the future. (I remember well the unmistakable question mark I fished out of the water one Stockholm night which fixed in lead my doubt of the future.) When I was a bit older (about twelve) I would play with Hugh, who was six, an elaborate war game based on H. G. Wells’s book Little Wars . In the holidays we were able to use the big tables in the School House dining-hall. We would push two tables together and lay out a whole countryside. There were roads marked in chalk and cottages and forests of twigs and rivers which had to be crossed. One game might last