I had a married half-brother and half-sister in Cairo who had both been there since I was a little boy. My brother, a leading Government official (at a salary less than my own), and his wife viewed my coming to Egypt, I heard, with justifiable alarm. They had heard of my political opinions. My sister, to whom I was devoted, had no such suspicions and wrote a letter of most affectionate welcome. Siegfried came to see me off. He said: ‘Do you know who’s on board? “The Image!” He’s still in the regiment, going to join the battalion in India. Last time I saw him he was sitting in the bottom of a dug-out gnawing a chunk of bully-beef like a rat.’ The Image had been at my last preparatory school and had won a scholarship at the same time as myself; and we had been at Wrexham and Liverpool together; and he had been wounded with the Second Battalion at High Wood at the same time as myself; and now we were travelling out East together. A man with whom I had nothing in common; there was no natural reason why we should have been thrown so often in each other’s company. The ship touched at Gibraltar, where we disembarked and bought figs and rode round the town. I remembered the cancelled War Office telegram and thought what a fool I had been to prefer Rhyl. At Port Said a friend of my sister’s helped us through the Customs; I was feeling very sea-sick, but I knew that I was in the East because he began talking about Kipling and Kipling’s wattles of Lichtenburg, and whether they were really wattles or some allied plant. And so to Cairo, looking out of the windows all the way, delighted at summer fields in January. My sister-in-law advised us against the more exclusive residential suburb of Gizereh, where she had just taken a flat herself, so with her help we found one at Heliopolis, a few miles east of Cairo. We found the cost of living very high, for this was the tourist season. But I was able to reduce the grocery bill by taking advantage of the more reasonable prices of the British army canteen; I presented myself as an officer on the pension list. We had two Sudanese servants, and, contrary to all that we had been warned about native servants, they were temperate, punctual, respectful, and never, to my knowledge, stole a thing beyond the remains of a single joint of mutton. It seemed queer to me not to look after the children or do housework, and almost too good to be true to have as much time as I needed for my writing.