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Mahogany, silver candlesticks, two maids and plenty of white starch. The conversation was uneasy; I could not believe it would be anything else with me about. My father was trying to ask me something – I imagine it would be by way of getting me to explain why I had been such an oaf – but my mother gave him a look which stopped him.
Mr Marsh did help. On January 4th 1916 I was being sworn in as a member of the armed forces. The officer had thin sneering lips. “So, you are Mr Marsh's friend?”, he inquired. Was I? Luckily he wasn't wanting an answer or heaven knows what I would have let him in for. A few days later I was in uniform, baggy, itchy, hot. I felt so unsoldierly that I had quite a shock when a girl who had given me a white feather a few days past didn't give me another as I passed by her beat. I thought she must have been pre-occupied or worried about something to have missed me. Then I realized that she had mistaken me – taken me? – for a soldier. My mother was proud of me.
I enjoyed the Inns of Court. We drilled in Lincoln's Inn Fields. We were very bad; even my feeble cadet corps experiences at school were enough to make me shine – or at least ‘glow’ – rather more than others.
We graduated to Hampstead Heath and to Leffman, an amateur – like us – CSM, an intelligent, efficient, drill-book performer – unlike us – who prided himself on the distinct and elocutionary exact pronouncement of his orders. One of us, a professional singer, Topliss Green, was contemptuous; “He thinks his voice carries!” Lunch – coffee and cheese at the Express Dairy – and ‘home’ in the evening.
Once, when we had been dismissed early, I went to evensong at St Paul's cathedral. It was a gloomy day. The non-conformist Sunday
had eaten deeply into the soft remnants of my soul; it brought back the queer sense of Doom from my prep school days which had confirmed my fundamental timidity. Many regard timidity as the disposition of a ‘milksop’ – flimsy, wayward, unreliable. In me it is the t