It was while I was still too young to be taking any intelligent interest in our family affairs that my father received his peerage. At a moment when the George Government was in a difficult position owing to the unfriendly attitude of certain of its Liberal critics, my father, who was before all else a patriot, rendered services to the chief powers of the nation which they were not slow to reward with a title. It is pleasant to think that we thus belong to the old nobility, before peerages were actually sold to the highest bidder—it was not until 1928, it will be remembered, that this necessary but regrettable innovation was introduced. My father would not take the title of Lord Barstoke, because our villagers at home pronounced the name in a way that would have made him hardly distinguishable from Lord Bostock; it was characteristic of his easy way of doing things that he simply took down a Bradshaw, ran his finger at random down the index of names, and became Lord Blisworth for the rest of his life. My girlhood was mostly spent in the country. My father, after his long days and often nights of work at the Board of Rubber Control, felt himself entitled to settle down when the war was over, and direct his financial schemes from a distance. A fatal resolution, could he but have foreseen its consequences! His preference was for the life of the country; he hated, he said, to be jostled by a crowd of strangers, and if the worst came to the worst, in a country place you could always go round with the professional. Hills were dear to him, and woods, and streams (especially the one you crossed in approaching the fifth green), and the little world of Barstoke was all he asked for and all he cared to know.