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 overreachedhimself 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 andpleasant 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, fragments of which would sometimes fall unexpectedly, and

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