In the nursery Antony remembered stress being laid upon the importance of getting out of bed with the right foot first. The problem, unsolved down to what press photographers call present day, was whether the word “right” in this context should be taken to mean the right of right or left, or the right of right and wrong. He had always had a sneaking feeling that to make it mean that you should get out of bed with the right foot rather than the left was altogether too easy, but that if there was a right foot and a wrong foot, and you didn’t know which was which, it was too difficult to cope with at all. This particular October morning was, from the start, one of the wrong-foot days. To begin with, John Norton’s alarm-clock, set to go off at 6:30, produced a delayed-action alarum at half past seven. Antony woke with a start, took a horrified look at the time, and jumped to the telephone. He had got to stop Delia catching the 8:45 bus from Wayshot. He got through in ten minutes, which wasn’t too bad.
