. .'

But Gerald passed over 'stuffy' without interest. 'I mean, you put up your defences even when nobody's attacking.'

'Do I? Maybe a conditioned reflex after so many years in the Service. I'll try to unlearn it when I'm just a retired old has- been writing a few pages a day in that terrible handwriting of mine-- or perhaps I ought to learn to type and spare the eyesight of some unfortunate secretary.'

'How long do you think it will take you?'

'Two or three years--maybe more. I won't mind.'

'Sort of a labour of love?'

'Well, certainly not of profit. As I said, my career hasn't been outstanding enough to send the public scurrying to the bookshops.'

'Still feeling prickly? I don't know what's eating you, but I'd say you haven't done so badly. Whatever sort of life you've had, you're fifty-three and you don't look anything like it.'

Charles beamed; from his own son, on his own son's seventeenth birthday, and at such a moment, there could have come no more timely reassurance. 'Fifty-TWO,' he corrected. 'Not fifty-THREE. I was born at the turn of the century, on July 28th, 1900.'

'That's a fine beginning. The Story of My Life, by Charles Anderson. Chapter One: "Early Years".'

'Good heavens, no; not that sort of thing at all. It's my WORK I shall deal with--I'll begin when I took up my first post.'

'Why? What's wrong about the early years? Didn't you have a good time then?'

'Of course.' Charles seemed slightly embarrassed. 'Nothing to complain of. That's why there wouldn't be much to write about.'

'NOTHING TO COMPLAIN OF'

Charles had just finished prep school in the summer of 1914; he started at Brookfield while those tremendous opening battles of the First World War were ending an age. The Somme, Jutland, and Passchendaele came to him later as headlines in the daily papers that reached Brookfield about mid-morning, at which time the school butler clamped them to the stands in the reading-room. Not till the lunch hour did the boys get a hasty glimpse over the shoulders of other boys, and usually after they had satisfied a much greater eagerness to discover who was on the list for the afternoon's compulsory games. There was neither stupidity nor callousness in this--merely the knack (so often necessary in life) of putting first things second. Many of them had brothers and some fathers in the war; all knew that if it lasted long enough they would be in it themselves. Charles had joined the school cadet corps, and with more effort than zeal was picking up the rudiments of being a soldier, drilling twice a week under a ferocious sergeant who taught him exactly where to lunge into an enemy's body with a bayonet. He did not think he would be very good at it, and was comforted to learn from Old Boys on leave from the front that most fighting was done with other weapons. In the evenings, when drills and games and lessons were over for the day, he relaxed in his School House study talking to friends and drinking coffee-- sometimes, when he was on his own, reading poetry. He even wrote some, which was duly published in the Brookfeldian under the pseudonym 'Vincio'. It had no special merit.

The school was then in charge of old 'Chips', who had been summoned from retirement to plug a hole in the wartime shortage of masters. Chips ran things with a benignity that made Brookfield more than tolerable to several boys who might otherwise have found it unpleasant. Charles was among them--by no means a misfit, but temperamentally not what many people would have called a typical public schoolboy. Since Chips doubted that such an animal existed Charles got along with him very well indeed, and it was Chips who made him a prefect despite warnings that boys who were bad at games were rarely good in authority. Charles, however, proved excellent-- somewhat on the lenient side, but wise in his decisions and a steady handler of crisis. One of his duties was to keep order in the junior dormitories during the hour before lights-out, and he found this easiest to do by being friendly and chatty. The youngsters liked him and called him 'Andy', a nickname that spread throughout the school.