I spent a good part of my early life at Wimbledon. My mother and father did not get rid of the house, a big one near the Common, until some time about the end of the war; yet of all the time I spent in it I can recall little or nothing of significance. But after the age of eleven or twelve I was away at school, and in the spring and summer holidays we were all in the country, so that I was only at Wimbledon in the Christmas holidays and for a day or two at the beginning and end of the other holidays. London was only a half-hour away and yet we seldom went there. My mother and father never took us to the theatre, not even to pantomimes, and until the middle of the war I had only been to the theatre twice in my life, and then only to children’s plays, taken by an aunt. My mother wished to bring us up to be serious and to benefit humanity in some practical way. She allowed us no hint of its dirtiness and intrigue and lustfulness, believing that innocence was the surest protection against them. Our reading was carefully censored by her. I was destined to be ‘if not a great man at least a good man.’ Our treats were educational or æsthetic, to Kew Gardens, Hampton Court, the Zoo, the British Museum, or the Natural History Museum. I remember my mother, in the treasure room at the British Museum, telling us with shining eyes that all these treasures were ours. We looked at her astonished. She said: ‘Yes, they belong to us as members of the public. We can look at them, admire them, and study them for as long as we like. If we had them back at home we couldn’t do more.’ We read more books than most children do. There must have been four or five thousand books in the house. They consisted of an old-fashioned scholar’s library bequeathed to my father by my namesake, whom I have mentioned as a friend of Wordsworth, but who had a far more tender friendship with Felicia Hemans; to this was added my father’s own collection of books, mostly poetry, with a particular cupboard for Anglo-Irish literature; devotional works contributed by my mother; educational books sent to my father by their publishers in the hope that he would recommend them for use in Government schools; and novels and adventure books brought into the house by my elder brothers and sisters.