The best part of Germany was the food. There was a richness and spiciness about it that we missed in England. We liked the rye bread, the black honey (black, I believe, because it came from the combs of the previous year), the huge ice-cream puddings made with fresh raspberry juice, and the venison, and the honey cakes, and the pastries, and particularly the sauces made with different sorts of mushrooms. And the bretzels, and carrots cooked with sugar, and summer pudding of cranberries and blue-berries. There was an orchard close to the house, and we could eat as many apples, pears, and greengages as we liked. There were rows of blackcurrant and gooseberry bushes. The estate, in spite of the recency of my grandfather’s tenure, and his liberalism and experiments in modern agricultural methods, was still feudalistic. The farm servants, because they talked a dialect that we could not understand and because they were Catholics and poor and sweaty and savage-looking, frightened us. They were lower even than the servants at home; and as for the colony of Italians settled about half a mile from the house, imported from Italy by my grandfather as cheap labour for his brick-making factory, we associated them in our minds with the ‘gypsies in the wood’ of the song. My grandfather took us over the factory one day; he made me taste a lump of Italian _polenta_. My mother told us afterwards (when a milk pudding at Wimbledon came to table burnt and we complained about it), ‘Those poor Italians at the factory used to burn their _polenta_ on purpose sometimes just for a change of flavour.’