Islip was a name of good omen to me: it was associated with Abbot Islip, a poor boy of the village who had become Abbot of Westminster and befriended John Skelton when he took sanctuary in the Abbey from the anger of Wolsey. I had come more and more to associate myself with Skelton, discovering a curious affinity. Whenever I wanted a motto for a new book I always found exactly the right one somewhere or other in Skelton’s poems. We moved into the Islip cottage and a new chapter started. I did not sit for my finals. XXIX We were at Islip from 1921 until 1925. My mother in renting us the house had put a clause in the agreement that it was to be used only as a residence and not for the carrying on of any trade or business. She wanted to guard against any further commercial enterprise on our part; she need not have worried. Islip was an agricultural village, and far enough from Oxford not to be contaminated with the roguery for which the outskirts of a university town are usually well known. The village policeman led an easy life. During the whole time we were living there we never had a thing stolen or ever had a complaint to make against a native Islip cottager. Once by mistake I left my bicycle at the station for two days, and, when I recovered it, not only were both lamps, the pump and the repair outfit still in place, but an anonymous friend had even cleaned it. Every Saturday in the winter months, as long as I was at Islip, I played football for the village team. There had been no football in Islip for some eighty years; the ex-soldiers had reintroduced it. The village nonogenarian complained that the game was not what it had been when he was a boy; he called it unmanly. He pointed across the fields to two aged willow trees: ‘They used to be our home goals,’ he said. ‘T’other pair was half a mile upstream. Constable stopped our play in the end. Three men were killed in one game; one was kicked to death, t’other two drowned each other in a scrimmage. Her was a grand game.’ Islip football, though not unmanly, was ladylike by comparison with the game as I had played it at Charterhouse. When playing centre-forward I was often booed now for charging the goalkeeper while he was fumbling with the shot he had saved. The cheers were reserved for my inside-left, who spent most of his time stylishly dribbling the ball in circles round and round the field until he was robbed; he seldom went anywhere near the goal-mouth. The football club was democratic. The cricket club was not. I played cricket the first season but left the club because the selection of the team was not always a selection of the best eleven men; regular players would be dropped to make room for visitors to the village who were friends of a club official, one of the gentry.