own
to themselves by way of Harrow and Ealing. It is a secret and solitary
game, as we found when we tried to play it together. We made a success
of that only once. All the way down to Margate we schemed defences and
assailed and fought them as we came back against the sunset. Afterwards
we recapitulated all that conflict by means of a large scale map of the
Thames and little paper ironclads in plan cut out of paper.

A subsequent revival of these imaginings was brought about by Britten's
luck in getting, through a friend of his father's, admission for us both
to the spectacle of volunteer officers fighting the war game in Caxton
Hall. We developed a war game of our own at Britten's home with nearly a
couple of hundred lead soldiers, some excellent spring cannons that shot
hard and true at six yards, hills of books and a constantly elaborated
set of rules. For some months that occupied an immense proportion of
our leisure. Some of our battles lasted several days. We kept the game a
profound secret from the other fellows. They would not have understood.

And we also began, it was certainly before we were sixteen, to write,
for the sake of writing. We liked writing. We had discovered Lamb
and the best of the middle articles in such weeklies as the SATURDAY
GAZETTE, and we imitated them. Our minds were full of dim uncertain
things we wanted to drag out into the light of expression. Britten had
got hold of IN MEMORIAM, and I had disinterred Pope's ESSAY ON MAN and
RABBI BEN EZRA, and these things had set our theological and cosmic
solicitudes talking. I was somewhere between sixteen and eighteen,
I know, when he and I walked along the Thames Embankment confessing
shamefully to one another that we had never read Lucretius. We thought
every one who mattered had read Lucretius.

When I was nearly sixteen my mother was taken ill very suddenly,
and died of some perplexing complaint that involved a post-mortem
examination; it was, I think, the trouble that has since those days
been recognised as appendicitis. This led to a considerable change in
my circumstances; the house at Penge was given up, and my Staffordshire
uncle arranged for me to lodge during school terms with a needy
solicitor and his wife in Vicars Street, S. W., about a mile and a half
from the school. So it was I came right into London; I had almost two
years of London before I went to Cambridge.

Those were our great days together. Afterwards we were torn apart