He was different not so much in that he was sincere as in that he was a pacifist.

‘Modern patriotism,’ he would say, ‘is a false emotion. In the Middle Ages they had the right idea. All that a man cared about was his family and his own home on the village green. It was immaterial to him who was ruling the country and what political opinions held sway. Wars were no concern of his.’ His favourite quotation was the remark of Joan’s father in Schiller’s drama on the Maid of Orleans, ‘Lasst uns still gehorchend harren wem uns Gott zum K?ng gibt,’ which he would translate for me as, ‘Let us trust obediently in the king God sends us.’

‘Then,’ he would go on, ‘came the industrial revolution. People had to move to the cities. They ceased to live on the land. Meanwhile our country, by being slightly more unscrupulous than anyone else, was obtaining colonies all over the world. Later came the popular press, and we have been exhorted ever since to love not only our own country, but vast tracts of land and people in the Empire whom we have never seen and never wish to see.’

I would then ask him to explain the emotion one always feels when, after a long time abroad, the South Coast express steams into Victoria Station. ‘False, quite false,’ he would say; ‘you’re a sentimentalist.’ I was inclined to agree with him. ‘Furthermore,’ he would say, ‘when this war comes, which, thanks to the benighted muddling of our Government, come it must, whose war is it going to be? You can’t tell me that it will be the same war for the unemployed labourer as for the Duke of Westminster. What are the people to gain from it? Nothing!’

But though his arguments against patriotism were intellectual, his pacifism was emotional. He had a completely sincere hatred of violence and killing, and the spectacle of army chaplains wearing field boots under the surplice revolted him.

At this time I was stroking one of the trial crews for the Oxford boat just previous to being thrown out for ‘lack of enthusiasm and cooperation.’ I was also on the editorial staff of the University magazine. David Rutter once asked me how I could reconcile heartiness with aestheticism in my nature. ‘You’re like a man who hires two taxis and runs between,’ he said. ‘What are you going to do when the war comes?’

I told him that as I was already in the University Air Squadron I should of course join the Air Force. ‘In the first place,’ I said, ‘I shall get paid and have good food. Secondly, I have none of your sentiments about killing, much as I admire them. In a fighter plane, I believe, we have found a way to return to war as it ought to be, war which is individual combat between two people, in which one either kills or is killed. It’s exciting, it’s individual, and it’s disinterested. I shan’t be sitting behind a long-range gun working out how to kill people sixty miles away. I shan’t get maimed: either I shall get killed or I shall get a few pleasant putty medals and enjoy being stared at in a night club. Your unfortunate convictions, worthy as they are, will get you at best a few white feathers, and at worst locked up.’

‘Thank God,’ said David, ‘that I at least have the courage of my convictions.’

I said nothing, but secretly I admired him. I was by now in a difficult position. I no longer wished to go to the Sudan; I wished to write; but to stop rowing and take to hard work when so near a Blue seemed absurd. Now in France or Germany one may announce at an early age that one intends to write, and one’s family reconciles itself to the idea, if not with enthusiasm at least with encouragement. Not so in England. To impress writing as a career on one’s parents one must be specific. I was. I announced my intention of becoming a journalist.