and succumbed
very easily to a low shooter or an unexpected Yorker, but usually he was
caught early by long leg. The difficulty was to bowl him before he got
caught. He loved to lift a ball to leg. After one had clean bowled him
at the practice nets one deliberately gave him a ball to leg just to
make him feel nice again.

Flack went about a world of marvels dreaming of leg hits. He has been
observed, going across the Park on his way to his highly respectable
club in Piccadilly, to break from profound musings into a strange brief
dance that ended with an imaginary swipe with his umbrella, a roofer,
over the trees towards Buckingham Palace. The hit accomplished, Flack
resumed his way.

Inadequately instructed foreigners would pass him in terror, needlessly
alert.

6

These schoolmasters move through my memory as always a little distant
and more than a little incomprehensible. Except when they wore flannels,
I saw them almost always in old college caps and gowns, a uniform which
greatly increased their detachment from the world of actual men. Gates,
the head, was a lean loose-limbed man, rather stupid I discovered when I
reached the Sixth and came into contact with him, but honest, simple
and very eager to be liberal-minded. He was bald, with an almost conical
baldness, with a grizzled pointed beard, small featured and, under the
stresses of a Zeitgeist that demanded liberality, with an expression of
puzzled but resolute resistance to his own unalterable opinions. He made
a tall dignified figure in his gown. In my junior days he spoke to me
only three or four times, and then he annoyed me by giving me a wrong
surname; it was a sore point because I was an outsider and not one of
the old school families, the Shoesmiths, the Naylors, the Marklows, the
Tophams, the Pevises and suchlike, who came generation after generation.
I recall him most vividly against the background of faded brown
book-backs in the old library in which we less destructive seniors were
trusted to work, with the light from the stained-glass window falling
in coloured patches on his face. It gave him the appearance of having no
colour of his own. He had a habit of scratching the beard on his cheek
as he talked, and he used to come and consult us about things and
invariably do as we said. That, in his phraseology, was "maintaining the
traditions of the school."

He had indeed an effect not of a man directing a school, but of a
man captured and dir