The headmaster who caned me on the hand was a lover of German culture, and impressed this feeling on the school, so that it was to my credit that I could speak German and had been to Germany. At my other preparatory schools this German connection was regarded as something at least excusable and perhaps even interesting. It was not until I went to Charterhouse that I was made to see it as a social offence. My history from the age of fourteen, when I went to Charterhouse, to just before the end of the war, when I began to realize things better, was a forced rejection of the German in me. In all that first period I used to insist indignantly that I was Irish and deliberately cultivate Irish sentiment. I took my self-protective stand on the technical point that it was the father’s nationality that counted. Of course I also accepted the whole patriarchal system of things. It is difficult now to recall how completely I believed in the natural supremacy of male over female. I never heard it even questioned until I met Nancy, when I was about twenty-two, towards the end of the war. The surprising sense of ease that I got from her frank statement of equality between the sexes was among my chief reasons for liking her. My mother had always taken the ‘love, honour, and obey’ contract literally; my sisters were brought up to wish themselves boys, to be shocked at the idea of woman’s suffrage, and not to expect as expensive an education as their brothers. The final decision in any domestic matter always rested with my father. My mother would say: ‘If two ride together one must ride behind.’ Nancy’s crude summary, ‘God is a man, so it must be all rot,’ took a load off my shoulders. We children did not talk German well; our genders and minor parts of speech were shaky, and we never learned to read Gothic characters or script. Yet we had the feel of German so strongly that I would say now that I know German far better than French, though I can read French almost as fast as I can read English and can only read a German book very painfully and slowly, with the help of a dictionary. I use different parts of my mind for the two languages. French is a surface acquirement and I could forget it quite easily if I had no reason to use it every now and then. V