After so much shifting about during the war I disliked leaving home, except to visit some well-ordered house where I could expect reasonable comfort. But Nancy was always proposing sudden ‘bursts for freedom,’ and I used to come with her and usually enjoy them. In 1922 we used a derelict baker’s van for a caravan ride down to the south-coast. We had three children with us, Catherine as a four-months-old baby. It rained every single day for the month we were away—and the problem of washing and drying the baby’s napkins whenever we camped for the night—and the problem of finding a farmer who would not mistake us for gypsies and would be willing to let us pull into his field—and then the shaft that twice dropped off when we were on hills—and twice the back of the cart flew open and a child fell out on the road—and the difficulty of getting oats for the horse (which had been five years on grass as being too old for work) on country roads organized for motor traffic—and cooking to be done in the open with usually a high wind and always rain and the primus stove sputtering and flaring up. It was near Lewes that we drew up on a strip of public land alongside the horse and van of a Mr. Hicks, a travelling showman from Brighton. He told us many tricks of the road and also the story of his life: ‘Yes, I saw the Reverend Powers, Cantab, of Rodmell last week, and he, knowing my history, said: “Well, Mr. Hicks, I suppose that in addressing you I should be right in putting the letters b.a. after your name?” I said: “I have the right to it certainly, but when a man’s down, you know how it is, he does not like attaching a handle to his name.” For you must know, I was once a master at Ardingly College.’ ‘Indeed, Mr. Hicks, and where were you b.a.?’ ‘Didn’t I just tell you, at Ardingly? I won a scholarship at the beginning and they gave me the choice of going to Oxford or Winchester or Cambridge or Eton. And I chose Winchester. But I was only there a twelvemonth. No, I couldn’t stand it any longer owing to the disgraceful corruption of the junior clergy and the undergraduates—you understand, of course. I rub up a bit of the classic now and then, but I like to forget those times. The other day, though, me and a young Jew-boy who had cleaned up seventy-five pounds at the race meeting with photographing and one thing and another, had a fine lark. I got out two old mortarboards and a couple of gowns from the box in the van where I keep them, and you should have seen us swaggering down Brighton Pier, my boy.’ A few days later we stopped at a large mansion in Hampshire, rented by Sir Lionel Philips, the South African financier, whom Nancy knew. I found myself in an argument with him about socialist economics, and he told me a story which I liked even better than Mr. Hicks’. ‘I visited Kimberley recently and realized what a deep hole I had made. Where, as a young man, I tore the first turf off with my bare hands, they were now mining down half a mile.’