As if to answer the question, my father, in the intervals from his career in France, would turn up at Norhurst with some devastating present – an air rifle, chemistry set, conjuring tricks or even golf club – and after a few flourishes and gestures, a few words of encouragement and a laugh, leave the fine tuning of my tuition as rifleman, chemist, magician or golfer to my aunt while he returned to fight the Germans or encourage the French. My aunt did her best, but I remember thinking one rainy day as we quarried out some lumps of ice to put on her forehead while waiting for the ambulance to arrive, that we shouldn’t have chosen the dining-room to play cricket. Most of these events passed my grandfather by. He got little sleep at night and would catch up during the day with a series of ‘forty winks’. Besides he had his own disasters to occupy him. The post would arrive, he would shake his head and on the backs of the envelopes begin a sequence of calculations that never seemed to come out well.
