My mother took us abroad to stay at my grandfather’s house in Germany five times between my second and twelfth year. After this he died and we never went again. He had a big old manor-house ten miles from Munich; it was called ‘Laufzorn,’ which means ‘Begone, care!’ Our summers there were easily the best things of my early childhood. Pine forests and hot sun, red deer and black and red squirrels, acres of blue-berries and wild strawberries; nine or ten different kinds of edible mushrooms that we went into the forest to pick, and unfamiliar flowers in the fields—Munich is high up and there are outcrops of Alpine flowers here and there—and the farm with all the usual animals except sheep, and drives through the countryside in a brake behind my grandfather’s greys. And bathing in the Iser under a waterfall; the Iser was bright green and said to be the fastest river in Europe. We used to visit the uncles who had a peacock farm a few miles away, and a granduncle, Johannes von Ranke, the ethnologist, who lived on the lakeshore of Tegensee, where every one had buttercup-blonde hair. And occasionally my Aunt Agnes, Baronin von Aufsess, who lived some hours away by train, high up in the Bavarian Alps, in Aufsess Castle. This castle was a wonder; it was built in the ninth century and had been in the von Aufsess family ever since. The original building was a keep with only a ladder-entrance half-way up. A medieval castle had been added. Aufsess was so remote that it had never been sacked, and its treasures of plate and armour were amazing. Each baron added to the treasure and none took away. My Uncle Siegfried was the heir. He showed us children the chapel with its walls hung with enamelled shields of each Aufsess baron, impaled with the arms of the family into which he married. These families were always noble. He pointed to a stone in the floor which pulled up by a ring and said: ‘That is the family vault where all we Aufsesses go when we die. I’ll go there one day.’ He scowled comically. (But he was killed in the war as an officer of the Imperial German Staff and I believe that they never found his body.) He had a peculiar sense of humour. One day we children found him on the pebbled garden path, eating the pebbles. He told us to go away, but, of course, we would not. We sat down and tried to eat pebbles too. He told us very seriously that eating pebbles was not a thing for children to do; we should break our teeth. We agreed after trying one or two; so to get rid of us he found us each a pebble which looked just like all the other pebbles, but which crushed easily and had a chocolate centre. But this was only on condition that we went away and left him to his picking and crunching. When we came back later in the day we searched and searched, but only found the ordinary hard pebbles. He never once let us down in a joke.