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a week, with perhaps two hundred men on either side, quick raids by cavalry and slow advances by infantry, measured on lengths of string, mêlées which led to the capture of prisoners, and bombardments with the two 4.2 naval guns. It was 1916, but war was still glamorous to a child.
    I passed too through a Meccano period, adding box to box each Christmas, but I had little skill as an engineer. For hobbies (a hobby is an almost compulsive necessity of childhood) I collected stamps. I sold my collection later to Hugh for cash which he always seemed to have easily available – he must have hoarded his weekly twopences, though I never discovered where, and bought with the proceeds books on Antarctic exploration. (The Arctic never interested me because it was all sea.) I day-dreamed of being taken on an expedition as a sea-scout, and when I was about ten I wrote to Doctor Bruce, the explorer, and criticized several statements in his book on Polar Exploration in the Home University Library. I received a courteous and defensive reply.
    I collected cigarette cards too, and for a very brief period, because somebody gave me a special album for them, postmarks, but I found these rather abstract and there was no Stanley Gibbons catalogue to indicate whether Penang was more valuable than Angmering. Crests and postcards too had their appropriate albums, and I remember another toy, a monorail car. I have never seen one since. The thin steel single rails were tricky to fasten and the car never kept to them long, swaying wildly, losing balance and plunging to earth. I should be nervous today of travelling by monorail.
    The books on the nursery shelves which interested me most were The Little Duke by Charlotte M. Yonge (the memory of this book returned to me when I was writing The Ministry of Fear and when I revised the novel after the war I inserted chapter headings from The Little Duke ), The Children of the New Forest by Captain Marryat, the Andrew Lang Fairy Books, the E. Nesbits, of which I liked best The Enchanted Castle, The Phoenix and the Carpet, Five Children and It (the less fantastic The Would-Be-Goods and The Treasure Seekers never meant much to me). Two incidents from these books have always remained vivid to me, one of terror and one of joyful excitement: the Ugly Wugglies made of masks and umbrellas in The Enchanted Castle who suddenly came alive and applauded the children’s play from their roofless mouths, clapping empty gloves, and the end of The Phoenix , when the magical bird has gone and a great box arrives full of everything the children have ever desired: ‘toys and games and books, and chocolate and candied cherries, and paint-boxesand photographic cameras’ – Brownies they would have been in those days. I think I read alone, but perhaps it was read aloud to us, Kipling’s Baa Baa Black Sheep , which was like a warning not to take happiness in childhood for granted. At an earlier period of course there was Beatrix Potter. I have never lost my admiration for her books and I have often reread her, so that I am not surprised when I find in one of my own stories, Under the Garden , a pale echo of Tom Kitten being trounced up by the rats behind the skirting-board and the sinister Anna-Maria covering him with dough, and in Brighton Rock the dishonest lawyer, Prewitt, hungrily echoes Miss Potter’s dialogue as he watches the secretaries go by carrying their little typewriters.
    Towards the end of this period in my life I came on Henty. We had on the nursery shelves a long run of Henty, and I particularly liked the dull historical parts. ‘The XIVth Hussars proceeded in close order to the top of the ridge. On the right flank were the Second Ghurkas …’ Rider Haggard I discovered after Henty. My favourite, of course, was King Solomon’s Mines , but the later adventures of Quatermain bored me. I fell fast in love with Nada the Lily, and because of his savagery I admired Chaka, the great King of Zululand. Later I