I took no part in undergraduate life, seldom visiting my college except to draw my Government grant and exhibition money; I refused to pay the college games’ subscription, having little interest in St. John’s and being unfit for games myself. Most of my friends were at Balliol and Queen’s, and in any case Wadham had a prior claim on my loyalty. I spent as little time as possible away from Boar’s Hill. At this time I had little to do with the children; they were in the hands of Nancy and the nurse—the nurse now also did the cooking and housework for us. Nancy felt that she wanted some activity besides drawing, though she could not decide what. One evening in the middle of the long vacation she suddenly said: ‘I must get away somewhere out of this for a change. Let’s go off on bicycles somewhere.’ We packed a few things and rode off in the general direction of Devonshire. The nights were coldish and we had not brought blankets. We found that the best way was to bicycle by night and sleep by day. We went over Salisbury Plain past several deserted army camps; they had a ghostly look. There was accommodation in these camps for a million men, the number of men killed in the Imperial Forces during the war. We found ourselves near Dorchester, so we turned in there to visit Thomas Hardy, whom we had met not long before when he came up to Oxford to get his honorary doctor’s degree. We found him active and gay, with none of the aphasia and wandering of attention that we had noticed in him at Oxford. I wrote out a record of the conversation we had with him. He welcomed us as representatives of the post-war generation. He said that he lived such a quiet life at Dorchester that he feared he was altogether behind the times. He wanted, for instance, to know whether we had any sympathy with the Bolshevik regime, and whether he could trust the _Morning Post’s_ account of the Red Terror. Then he was interested in Nancy’s hair, which she wore short, in advance of the fashion, and in her keeping her own name. His comment on the name question was: ‘Why, you _are_ old-fashioned. I knew an old couple here sixty years ago that did the same. The woman was called Nanny Priddle (descendant of an ancient family, the Paradelies, long decayed into peasantry), and she would never change her name either.’ Then he wanted to know why I no longer used my army rank. I said it was because I was no longer soldiering. ‘But you have a right to it; I would certainly keep my rank if I had one. I should be very proud to be called Captain Hardy.’