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anyone spoke too enthusiastically about foreign travel.’34
    Gerald’s love affair with ‘abroad’ began when he left Eton and, encouraged by his parents, decided to pursue a diplomatic career. Rather than go to university, it was deemed normal to go on a ‘sort of protracted Grand Tour’, to learn French, German and other languages.35 In common with his friend and later colleague Harold Nicolson, as well as numerous other aspiring diplomats, the sixteen-year-old Gerald went to stay in various private establishments that took in young Englishmen.
    The first exhilarating step towards leaving the straitjacket of his English upbringing was taken at the beautiful Château Résenlieu in Normandy, where the teenager was deposited by his mother. Under the tutelage of an impoverished aristocratic widow who had opened her home to young men wanting to learn French, Gerald did learn the language. But more important, conveniently separated from the narrow outlook of family, school and dreaded sports, his horizons opened up. Many of the seeds of his future existence were sown, from a love of Corot’s art and a pursuit of this painting style himself, to an ability to converse on complex subjects with people from different backgrounds. Unlike so many of his compatriots who remained linguistically and culturally isolated, Gerald was brave enough to undergo the humiliation of being the vulnerable foreigner. He described the process of trying ‘to be amiable in a foreign language’ as like ‘a dog trying to express its thoughts to a human being’.36
    According to Gerald, during this soft, flower-scented summer idyll, he even fell in love – if only from afar and somewhat self-consciously – with a girl named Henriette. More convincing than this dreamy romance are his descriptions of how food came to be a significant element in his life. He had shown an interest in delicious tastes in earlier days – a letter home from school mentions that ‘Fuller’s at Eton have got a wonderful new American drink called “Ice Cream Soda”’ – but France brought something different. Far from the plain cooking and embarrassment of the puritanical Victorians of his childhood, Gerald learned to take pleasure in a fast-developing Epicureanism. He became dedicated to eating and providing others with wonderful food. ‘I began to interest myself in questions as to whether tarragon were preferable to chervil in a sauce,’ and to watch dishes being prepared in the kitchen ‘without feeling that I was making a nuisance of myself or incurring the stigma of greediness’.37
    By 1901, Gerald was in Dresden attending a diplomatic crammer where geography, history and Latin were required as well as languages. Composition was becoming increasingly significant to him and he took lessons with the composer Edmund Kretschmer. His early love for Chopin had moved on to Wagner, but in Germany he became an ardent admirer of Richard Strauss. His peripatetic, informal studies continued over the next years in pursuit of passing the Foreign Office exams, but it was music that remained at the centre of his existence. Despite there being no evidence of any particularly close relationships at this time, what is clear is that he was an intensely emotional young man. Gerald later described how his moods swung from ‘attacks of ecstasy almost orgiastic in their violence’ to deep depression and despair.38 It is tantalising to wonder whether these extremes of feeling were ever focused on people close to him, or whether (as some commentators have implied) he was too shy and diffident, and instead poured his passionate feelings into playing and composing music.
    Despite Gerald’s intelligence and years of studying, he failed the demanding Foreign Office exams in 1905, much to his distress. Two years later he failed again, and shortly afterwards his father, Captain Tyrwhitt, died at sea – though he was convalescing on a cruise in the Mediterranean rather than on naval