‘There was once a peasant family living in Schleswig-Holstein, where they all have crooked mouths, and one night they wished to blow out the candle. The father’s mouth was twisted to the left, so! and he tried to blow out the candle, so! but he was too proud to stand anywhere but directly before the candle, and he puffed and he puffed, but could not blow the candle out. And then the mother tried, but her mouth was twisted to the right, so! and she tried to blow, so! and she was too proud to stand anywhere but directly before the candle, and she puffed and puffed, but could not blow the candle out. Then there was the brother with mouth twisted outward, so! and the sister with the mouth twisted downward, so! and they tried each in their turn, so! and so! and the idiot baby with his mouth twisted in an eternal grin tried, so! And at last the maid, a beautiful girl from Copenhagen with a perfectly formed mouth, put it out with her shoe. So! Flap!’ These quotations make it clear how much more I owe, as a writer, to my mother than to my father. She also taught me to ‘speak the truth and shame the devil!’ Her favourite biblical exhortation was ‘My son, whatever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might.’ I always felt that Wimbledon was a wrong place, neither town nor country. It was at its worst on Wednesdays, my mother’s ‘At Home’ day. Tea was in the drawing-room. We were called down in our Sunday clothes to eat cakes, be kissed, and be polite. My sisters were made to recite. Around Christmas, celebrated in the German style, came a dozen or so children’s parties; we used to make ourselves sick with excitement. I do not like thinking of Wimbledon. Every spring and summer after my third year, unless we happened to go to Germany, or to France as we did once, we went to Harlech in North Wales. My mother had built a house there. In the days before motor traffic began around the North Welsh coast, Harlech was a very quiet place and little known, even as a golf centre. It was in three parts. First, the village itself, five hundred feet up on a steep range of hills; it had granite houses with slate roofs and ugly windows and gables, chapels of seven or eight different denominations, enough shops to make it the shopping centre of the smaller villages around, and the castle, a favourite playground of ours. Then there was the Morfa, a flat plain from which the sea had receded; part of this was the golf links, but to the north was a stretch of wild country which we used to visit in the spring in search of plovers’ eggs. The sea was beyond the links—good hard sand stretching for miles, safe bathing, and sandhills for hide and seek.