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grandfather mixed very nicely, and your father was right glad of his company when there wasn’t so much of anybody else’s.’
    This shot got home on Uncle Henry, who had been a poor sick-visitor. It never took my family long to work up a row and listening from the kitchen through the partly open door, I waited for some real north-country family sparring. But my Uncle John, Grandfather’s eldest son, and a fair man, chipped in and put a stop to it. ‘Now that’s enough,’ he rumbled in his deep voice. ‘We’ll have no wranglin’ wi’ the old man hardly in his coffin.’ There was a short pause and I could imagine him looking round at everyone. ‘I’d a fancy for that watch meself, but me father knew what he was about an’ if he chose to leave it young Will, then I’m not goin’ to argue about it.’ And that was the end of it; the watch was mine.
    The house seemed very strange without my grandfather and during the half-hour after tea, when it had been my custom to sit with him, I felt for a long time greatly at a loss. The watch had a lot to do with this feeling. I still admired it in the late afternoon but now it hung by the mantelshelf in the kitchen where I had persuaded my mother to let it be. My grandfather and his watch had always been inseparable in my mind, and to see the watch without at the same time seeing him was to feel keenly the awful finality of his going. The new position of the watch was in the nature of a compromise between my mother and me. While it was officially mine, it was being held in trust by my mother until she considered me old enough and careful enough to look after it. She was all for putting it away till that time, but I protested so strongly that she finally agreed to keep it in the kitchen where I could see it all the time, taking care, however, to have it away in a drawer when any of the family were expected, because, she said, there was no point in ‘rubbing it in’.
    The holidays came to an end and it was time for me to start my first term at the Grammar School in Cressley. A host of new excitements came to fill my days. I was cast into the melting pot of the first form and I had to work for my position in that new fraternity along with twenty-odd other boys from all parts of the town. Friendships were made in those first weeks which would last into adult life. One formed first opinions about one’s fellows, and one had one’s own label stuck on according to the first impression made. For first impressions seemed vital, and it looked as though the boy who was lucky or clever enough to assert himself favourably at the start would have an advantage for the rest of his schooldays.
    There are many ways in which a boy – or a man – may try to establish himself with his fellows. One or two of my classmates grovelled at everyone’s feet, while others took the opposite line and tried systematically to beat the form into submission, starting with the smallest boy and working up till they met their match. Others charmed everyone by their skill at sports, and others by simply being themselves and seeming hardly to make any effort at all. I have never made friends easily and I was soon branded as aloof. For a time I did little more than get on speaking terms with my fellows.
    One of our number was the youngest son of a well-to-do local tradesman and he had a brother who was a prefect in the sixth. His way of asserting himself was to parade his possessions before our envious eyes; and while these tactics did not win him popularity they gained him a certain following and made him one of the most discussed members of the form. Crawley’s bicycle was brand new and had a three-speed gear, and oil-bath gearcase, a speedometer, and other desirable refinements. Crawley’s fountain pen matched his propelling pencil and had a gold nib. His football boots were of the best hide and his gym slippers were