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an appointment for lunch with a leader of the Resistance who had been personally responsible for the murder of half a dozen German soldiers. ‘I hope you don’t sympathize with that,’ a friend said to me.
    I felt very conspicuous walking over a piece of open country in town clothes and a soft hat. German soldiers were drilling and a German officer was walking behind me. I was afraid of being stopped. I saw some militia also on an exercise.
    At the entrance to a small town I was surprised to find a customs post. There was no avoiding it. I was stopped by a black soldier and the man in charge asked me if I had anything to declare. I said, ‘Two hundred cigarettes.’ He tore the pack open, checked the cigarettes, and returned them to me, pointing to a poster which authorized him to pass cigarettes ifthey were ‘elegantly and properly’ declared. So I went on to what I knew would be a dangerous lunch.

    I found myself back in the Malayan Emergency, which I had known in the Common World in 1951. I was hiding from the Chinese guerrillas, but at the same time I was a possible target for the British bombers searching them out. The bombers had an ingenious system by which electric lightbulbs lit up on the ground to expose the presence of a living person and then a bomb was dropped. I lay down on the ground and immediately a light went on beside me. I flung it away into the dark and crawled away, but as soon as I stopped another light went on. There seemed little hope of escaping the bombs, but all the same I somehow did escape, and joined an unofficial group of English who were searching for the guerrillas.

    I was only nine in the Common World when the First World War began, but in the World of My Own my memory of 1914 is very different.
    The war began with total disaster to the British army and the unconditional surrender of Field Marshal French, who became himself a prisoner with another general who bore the name of Juillard. Their wives were allowed to join them in captivity, which helped their morale, and General Juillard’s wife brought him an electrical apparatus with which he could ‘do things’ and pass the time. What puzzles me now is how we emerged victorious after such a total defeat.

    For the first time in this very personal World of My Own I found myself someone else. I was Wilfred Owen, the poet, and I wore an officer’s uniform and a steel helmet in the style of the First World War. I was alone in a dug-out and I recited a poem I had composed to the photograph of the girl I loved. I called the poem ‘Givenchy’, which I suppose was a place in the line held by my regiment. The poem went something like this and I spoke it aloud.
    Imagine, dear, the shallow trench
,
An impregnable redoubt

For this good night and more
.
    Suddenly weariness of the interminable war swept over me and I began to sob. As I cried—or rather as Wilfred Owen cried—a voice said, ‘The Germans have dropped gas bombs on this or that section.’

VI

Moments of Danger and Fear
    I have just spent a dangerous day in Haiti at Port-au-Prince. I was with my friend Trevor Wilson, a former member of M.I.6 whom I had last seen when he was consul in Hanoi. We were both arrested almost immediately on landing. My black police guard proved to be a great reader of rather juvenile fiction featuring a character called Bambi. Opening one of the stories at random I could see it was high-flown and erotic, with a scene where Bambi was being seduced by the Queen of Heaven.
    I promised the man that I would get him the complete series of about seventeen volumes, and he whisked me into an invalid chair, put a cloth over my head, and so got me out of prison. Somehow I managed to release Trevor too and we went rapidly down the road and then up the drive of the British embassy to take refuge there. I was a little hurt by the coolness and lack of interest shown by the ambassadorand his wife, who had just returned from a picnic. I had known them before, when