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Francesca my darling,
… Ought we sometime to think of what guests at the Reception might want to mix with others there unknown to them? Or do we just let them mill around and think what odd people the others are and how odd we must be to know such queer fish? I think I ought to keep a list of guests to get the names well into my mind beforehand. It is good to study these details because so often the difference between
an indifferent show and a good show depends on some such little preparation, even though on the actual occasion it may not seem to count for much.
The thought inspires me to embark on another instalment of Bion history. So here goes: I hope you don't mind?
Roy Bion, ‘Noah’, belongs to the Rupert Bion outfit. My Uncle Rupert was married to my Aunt Alice. He became enormously wealthy, by Bion standards, but lost it all in the end. He was an indigo planter in India and could have ended very wealthy but was so annoyed with Congress and Ghandi that he preferred to go down fighting rather than sell out at a profit which he might have done. He was a very stout genuine soul with all the Anglo–Indian merchant's ignorance of culture and indifference to everything except hard work and personal comfort. His sons were Euston – I think they must have meant Eustace but got mixed up with the railway station – Ken, Roy and Laurie. His daughter was a minx of the name of Gladys. I only knew them when in England since I never went back to India after eight.
Whenever I came across them I was impressed by the atmosphere of luxury and indescribable chaos. Euston and Ken, as befits young men at Trinity, Cambridge, and New College, Oxford, were painfully ashamed of their family and painstakingly determined to lick it into shape. Uncle Rupert was humorously charmed by an appreciative awareness of the fact that he himself was the source of their greatest embarrassment. He recognized that he was the formidable barrier to any real advance in the social scale. When I was about ten I