The new things which most impressed me were the long path from the street to the front door, on the right the red-brick Tudor school hall and on the left, divided from me only by a flower-bed, the old disused churchyard. There was a white cat which used to sit on the tombstones and it was said by my father to be the ghost of a notorious absentee headmaster in the eighteenth century. When I was sixteen I sat on a gravestone with Peter Quennell and we both read aloud to each other from The Yellow Book with a sense of daring and decadence. At the end of the long path, beyond the house, one reached the tennis-court, and beside the tennis-court was a small flower-garden with a pond full of tadpoles, and a buddleia which in summer swarmed with peacock butterflies. One of my early memories is of catching near the buddleia a female orange-tip which they told me was a very rare specimen, much rarer than the male. After I caught a butterfly I would put it in a poison-bottle, but a scruple always inhibited me from pinning it out in a case as my elders did, so the corpses soon became brittle and from frequent examination fell to powder, and then I threw them away.
