On Sunday nights he would read aloud a chapter from some favourite blood-curdler; he read well and enjoyed reading, and once, during a tense moment in Dracula, a listener fainted--an event which gave Charles singular and lasting renown.

Considering that he was bad at games (which he pretended to enjoy, nevertheless, but which he actually detested), Charles was quite popular at Brookfield, and fairly, though not enormously, happy there. He made a few close friends who stayed friends in later years, and besides Chips there was another master who influenced him--a young Frenchman named Brunon who visited the school once a week to give art lessons to a few eccentrics. Art at Brookfield was an alternative to chemistry; on reaching the fifth form one could choose, and as the laboratory promised better fun than the studio, it was favoured by most. But Charles liked M. Brunon and was encouraged by him to develop an aptitude for painting, so that he whiled away many a pleasant hour in the school grounds, producing small water-colour landscapes so quickly that he would often give them away to onlookers and thus conciliate those who might otherwise have scoffed at such a hobby. One such painting by Charles hangs in the head's study at Brookfield today; it shows the school roofs beyond the trees in winter when clouds are rolling up for a storm. It is not as mediocre as the poetry he wrote (indeed, for his age, it shows distinct promise), but its chief interest perhaps is that a schoolboy should have wanted to go out in such weather for such a purpose. You can almost see that the clouds on the horizon will bring snow, not rain.

Like most male members of his family, Charles was intended for Cambridge when the time should come, and it was Chips again who suggested his entering for a history scholarship, despite an absence of encouragement from home. Charles did not win the scholarship, but came so near to it that he was awarded an exhibition entitling him to enter the University in the following September--that is, if the army did not claim him first, which it probably would.

His last term at Brookfield was in the summer of 1918, when the war, despite a heartening turn of the tide, still looked desperately far from a finish. He was now of military age, but found that by joining the Cambridge University O.T.C. he could, for a short time at least, combine the profession of arms with actual residence at a college. It seemed a miraculous device for getting a little pleasure before being killed, for at that stage of the war second-lieutenants on the Western Front did not live long. To Charles the war was something he would face, like compulsory games, when he had to, but he had no romantic illusions, and the poetry he wrote, if it ever touched on the subject, was more in the spirit of Siegfried Sassoon than of Rupert Brooke.

During that autumn of final battles that few could guess were final, Charles formed fours on the cobbled quadrangles and night- manoeuvred on the fenlands along the Ely road. He wore a uniform that looked like an officer's, and sometimes on dark days he was mistakenly saluted by non-commissioned men on leave from France. When this happened he felt he wanted to run after them and apologize, but of course that would have been absurd; so he either saluted back, which seemed presumptuous and was certainly incorrect, or else ignored them, which made him feel churlish. (The problem, with its absence of any completely satisfying solution, was a sample of many that plagued him in later affairs.) In the main, though, life was pleasant and not too military--the O.T.C. adjutant, for instance, was a history professor who could lecture on the machine gun as gently as on the Holy Roman Empire.

Charles was given college rooms that dated from the early seventeenth century, and when he returned to them after a route- march old Debden, who was his gyp, always had a hip-bath and a can of warm water waiting in front of the sitting-room fire. (The college had not yet installed any other kind of baths.) After rinsing himself in this meagre but traditional fashion Charles would dress, drink a cup of tea, and sally forth into the twilit town. The buildings in the narrow streets had an air of stooping over him protectively as he walked; he liked to push open the side- door of Heffer's bookshop in Petty Cury and spend an hour or so reading what he could not afford to buy. Then back to college in time for dinner in Hall, where he would drink his pint of beer under the portraits of old collegians who had been in their time the kings and counsellors of England.

Charles loved Cambridge with an ache because separation hovered so close and perhaps so tragically. Then all at once the war ended. Along with millions of other youths throughout the world he was reprieved--catapulted without warning into the idea of a future. After the initial thrill there was a curious feeling of anticlimax. He got drunk several times and took part in a riot with which the armed forces stationed in the town and district celebrated the end of the slaughter. The change was so abrupt that emptiness rather than happiness followed the withdrawal of other sensations, and as day after day passed by, each one so full of events abroad that even the palate of a historian must be jaded, Charles sought peace of his own by a process of wishful reasoning. England had won, and as a young Englishman he might well concede the timeliness of having been born in that birth-year of the century, so that he was old enough to have been ready, yet too young to have been called upon. He had been luckier than his best friend at Brookfield, killed in Mesopotamia, or than his brother Lindsay, stuck in a German prison camp awaiting repatriation. Perhaps these were reasons why he lacked the completely festive spirit, though he knew his own good fortune was to be alive. And also to be English. For with half Europe starving and another half in revolution, England, after the long ordeal, was still recognizably herself, and Cambridge was beginning to breathe again to an ancient rhythm of its own.