I was born in 1915, a great anniversary, but one little kept. Little kept, because at the time of its occurrence England and France, the two protagonists of Waterloo, were leagued in what then seemed a holy alliance, and Germany, whose tardy aid settled the fortunes of that earlier conflict, could find no place, a hundred years later, in the sympathies of either combatant. My sex, it will be seen, belied the omens of my nativity. My father, at that time a commoner, was a Winterhead, of a good old Somerset family, whose ramifications it were poor modesty in an autobiographer to trace out for her own ennoblement. My mother, whose maiden name was Linthorpe, was the daughter of a Westmorland squire of comfortable means but little prominence. At the time of their marriage my father’s business position was so sound (he was a partner in several rubber companies) that no great pains were taken about the drawing up of the settlement; and, by a series of family accidents which I do not propose to set out here, the whole of my mother’s very considerable prospects passed into other hands. Such a deprivation caused, at the time, little foreboding to a man who had an ample income from stocks, quite apart from the position which he enjoyed as squire of Barstoke, a dream-like village that rests, half-hidden among mist-wreathed poplars, in one of the fairest valleys of Somerset. It would have been my good fortune to find solace in the companionship of two brothers younger than myself, had not a mysterious destiny—which of us can read his life’s record without confusion, when he considers the long tale of infants who never reach maturity?—carried off both in the age of their innocence to a world where innocence has its value. An only child—for such I was, in effect—keeps fewer memories, I suppose, of its very earliest years than one which from the first takes its place among a series. The shadowy forms that people those years for me are the forms of domestic servants, comfort-bringing cooks and awe-inspiring butlers, whose short and simple annals there is no need to record in this book. My nurse, a woman of strong character and decided views, left me little permanent legacy of her care except that which most nurses leave to most English children—a horror of spiders and of the Pope. My mother was known to me as a lady who lived in a comfortable smell of tweeds on a hard, scratchy chair, in front of a table full of shiny things which I was forbidden to touch (not without reason, I found, for they were hot when touched), and appeared to surround herself with a group of similarly dressed ladies whom it was my favourite parlour trick to distinguish, in spite of superficial resemblances, from her. My father was two round legs, with provocative little tags hanging out of either stocking, who must be approached cautiously if it were soon after a meal, because the approach was likely to result in a sudden,