My father followed a peculiar profession. He conveyed second-rate racehorses from one part of the globe to another. Sometimes he’d be conducting a brace of duds to Jamaica or over to Ireland or France. He received frequent bites and hacks from his charges, but he expected them and, I believe, was invariably kind to these glorified “screws.” Consequently he was away a great deal, but, as this traffic was sporadic, had much spare time, most of which he spent in conveying pints of stout from a pot to his belly. My mother was a good-tempered slut, and the only quarrels she ever had with the Pater concerned their respective shares of that filthy fluid. Apart from her good temper and her thirst, there is nothing to record concerning her. My father, a squat, bow-legged little gnome, had that complete, unquestioning belief in the mingled credulity and rascality of his fellow-men which those who are connected professionally with the Sport of Kings invariably share. “Racing,” he was wont to declare, “consists of mugs, bloody mugs, crooks, bloody crooks and ’orses.” “And which are you?” asked my mother. “I ain’t neither. I just helps the crooks to skin the mugs by movin’ about the ’orses. I’ve seen too much of it. I’ve seen blokes who was pretty artful at the doings in the ornery way become just too bloody silly whenever they ’ear the bookie’s chorus.” He was so convinced of the peculiar opportunities afforded to bookmakers for plumbing the depths of human simplicity that he suggested having me apprenticed to their profession, but my mother threw a pot at his head for suggesting it. “I didn’t bear my boy to be a bookie,” was her inflexible decision. All the same, these repeated references to mugs and crooks had the effect of convincing my childish mind that the world was entirely peopled by these two classes. As an example of the lasting effect of those lessons learnt in infancy, I remain of that opinion to this day. Most of the money for my education went to quenching my parents’ thirst, but I was taught to read and write, and acquired the rest myself. In my errand boy days the only literature I could afford was a newspaper, but this was sufficient to enable me to test the truth of my father’s generalisation. For the most part it seemed to me triumphantly to support it. Let me give a few examples. The head of the firm for which I worked was one of the greatest commercial figures in England, and the papers frequently contained articles from his (secretary’s) pen dilating on the blessings of thrift, hard work and early marriage to “Miss Right”--yes, he actually used that expression. Yet everyone from the Managing Director to myself knew that he gambled wildly, ill-treated his wife, and kept a succession of decorative harpies labelled “dancing girls.”