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My formal education began in a small preparatory school in Bromstead. I went there as a day boy. The charge for my instruction was mainly set off by the periodic visits of my father with a large bag of battered¹ fossils to lecture to us upon geology. I was one of those fortunate youngsters who take readily to school work, I had a good memory, versatile² interests and a considerable appetite for commendation, and when I was barely twelve I got a scholarship at the City Merchants School and was entrusted³ with a scholar's railway season ticket to Victoria. After my father's death a large and very animated⁴ and solidly built uncle in tweeds from Staffordshire, Uncle Minter, my mother's sister's husband, with a remarkable⁶ accent and remarkable vowel⁷ sounds, who had plunged⁹ into the Bromstead home once or twice for the night but who was otherwise unknown to me, came on the scene, sold off the three gaunt houses with the utmost gusto, invested the proceeds and my father's life insurance money, and got us into a small villa¹⁰ at Penge within sight of that immense facade¹¹ of glass and iron, the Crystal Palace. Then he retired¹² in a mood of good-natured contempt to his native habitat again. We stayed at Penge until my mother's death.

School became a large part of the world to me, absorbing my time and interest, and I never acquired that detailed¹³ and intimate knowledge of Penge and the hilly villadom round about, that I have of the town and