tead Institute, Fenimore Cooper and Mayne Reid and illustrated
histories; one of the Russo-Turkish war and one of Napier's expedition
to Abyssinia I read from end to end; Stanley and Livingstone, lives
of Wellington, Napoleon and Garibaldi, and back volumes of PUNCH, from
which I derived conceptions of foreign and domestic politics it has
taken years of adult reflection to correct. And at home permanently we
had Wood's NATURAL HISTORY, a brand-new illustrated Green's HISTORY OF
THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, Irving's COMPANIONS OF COLUMBUS, a great number
of unbound parts of some geographical work, a VOYAGE ROUND THE WORLD I
think it was called, with pictures of foreign places, and Clarke's NEW
TESTAMENT with a map of Palestine, and a variety of other informing
books bought at sales. There was a Sowerby's BOTANY also, with thousands
of carefully tinted pictures of British plants, and one or two other
important works in the sitting-room. I was allowed to turn these over
and even lie on the floor with them on Sundays and other occasions of
exceptional cleanliness.

And in the attic I found one day a very old forgotten map after the
fashion of a bird's-eye view, representing the Crimea, that fascinated
me and kept me for hours navigating its waters with a pin.

2

My father was a lank-limbed man in easy shabby tweed clothes and with
his hands in his trouser pockets. He was a science teacher, taking
a number of classes at the Bromstead Institute in Kent under the old
Science and Art Department, and "visiting" various schools; and our
resources were eked out by my mother's income of nearly a hundred
pounds a year, and by his inheritance of a terrace of three palatial but
structurally unsound stucco houses near Bromstead Station.

They were big clumsy residences in the earliest Victorian style,
interminably high and with deep damp basements and downstairs
coal-cellars and kitchens that suggested an architect vindictively
devoted to the discomfort of the servant class. If so, he had
overreached himself and defeated his end, for no servant would stay
in them unless for exceptional wages or exceptional tolerance of
inefficiency or exceptional freedom in repartee. Every storey in the
house was from twelve to fifteen feet high (which would have been cool
and pleasant in a hot climate), and the stairs went steeply up, to end
at last in attics too inaccessible for occupation. The ceilings had vast
plaster cornices of classical design, fr