there was no change in my working life except , as the years went on , for better positions and more money . but there was a great change in my social life , as complete as that from school to the nursery garden . cut off from my old acquaintances , and Slough &apos;s mad round of spurious gaiety , I groomed myself for the country life . to do this , I threw in my lot ( about &amp;pound;12 ) with my sister &apos;s , who had always been so horsey that she might have been a Sellars and Yeatman original . with the help of Bertie Barnwell , an old acquaintance of my mother &apos;s from Pytchley , we bought a hunter , saddle and bridle for &amp;pound;25 . with a slit in the back of my coat and a straw between my teeth , standing with my feet in the fifth position , smelling faintly of ammonia , I could soon talk horse until the cows came home . I could talk of the Italian forward seat , the uselessness of hunter classes at horse shows , the vagaries of scent , and I could quote Surtees , Beckford , and the Badminton Library books on hunting and driving , and the horse and hound , as if the opinions I expressed were my own . my best line was whether it were better to ride to hunt or hunt to ride . I was for the former , on account of the fact that I was never a brilliant horseman . I read memoirs of a foxhunting man in full , and after that there was no holding me - not with snaffle , gag , pelham , curb , bridoon or universal ( all done from memory , nothing up my sleeve ) . I hunted on Saturdays in the winter and went to horse shows in the summer . I stopped earths , built fences , dug badgers , schooled ponies , drove traps , and became the complete unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable . I lost touch with my old friends and their narrow outlook , making new ones with a narrower . the local hunt was the staff College drag , which hunted fox on two days a week and ran a drag line for another two . what with this and preparing for their annual pantomime , it is surprising that we were as well prepared for war in 1939 as we were . but this military atmosphere , and the example of some of my old friends in Slough , persuaded me to apply for a commission in the territorial army , and I was gazetted 2nd Lieutenant in the 5th battalion , the Queen &apos;s royal regiment , in 1936 , one of the 800 officers to have his commission signed by King Edward 8 . this was all part of the act . I was beginning to put on the agony of the squire , the yeoman farmer , the old A G Street romantic stuff . I found out that my family had lived in Chobham ( the parent village to West End ) for over 350 years and that we had been honoured in the district , at some time in the dim past , by having a local common ( Street &apos;s Heath ) named after us . students of Surtees will now readily understand that a latent cynicism made me decide then that if ever I should write enough to need a pseudonym , it would be Stephen Dumpling . the act was good , but it lacked the necessary backing . I soon realized that in spite of my attention to my uncle and aunt I had no hope of joining them at the nursery during my uncle &apos;s lifetime . my only possible expectation was that it would be left to me after his death , with some provision for my aunt . as they were then aged respectively seventy-four and sixty-eight , it seemed as if I might not have to wait so very long , at that . not that I did n&apos;t work hard : almost every evening I would call on my uncle at the nursery , after I had bathed and changed , to have a chat with him . I took them both to church . regularly , Sunday in and Sunday out , I went to church at eleven o&apos;clock , to matins , the service of respectability . nothing so common as evensong ( the service for the servants after a day &apos;s work on the day of rest ) or anything so extravagant and Romish as a regular attendance at the eight o&apos;clock communion service . going to church continued to be a habit , one that included a walk round the nursery with my uncle - and the constant hope that he would drop a hint about my future prospects . my uncle had been people &apos;s churchwarden for so long that no one could remember anyone else . when he gave up , I followed him . it was Trollope , Jane Austen , Angela Thirkell , the lot . but I was , in fact , only a correspondence clerk on a nursery . because of my family connections ( everyone assumed that one day I should go into the business ) I could only obtain promotion if it were impossible to find anyone else to do the job . I might leave at any moment and take my knowledge and ability to my uncle . so , at twenty-two , I settled down to wait , as a dead end kid , having learnt all that it seemed necessary to learn to step into my uncle &apos;s shoes and a ready-made business . quite apart from this thwarting situation , growing rhododendrons and azaleas seemed , in 1939 , to be a futile occupation . Munich and its aftermath made gardening a trap more than an escape , to a young man of twenty-two . even hunting was beginning to pall , and in March 1939 I attended what I thought would be the last meet of the staff College draghounds . my energies were now directed to the territorial army and my reading matter became field service regulations 1927 , volume 2 , and Cassandra of the daily mirror . William Connor , who began that column in 1935 , is my favourite journalist . my secret ambition was to write a similar column but with a right-wing slant . before the war I seldom agreed with what Connor wrote , but I was lost in admiration for the way it was written . and once , about this time , he was so very wrong . he wrote a bitter , brilliant piece tearing to bits , with every tooth and claw in his magnificent vocabulary , the comment of some woman in America that , to people doing a routine job , war could be a welcome relief . she was right . he was wrong . for it was a relief to me . and if I had still been hoeing , it would have been more so . in peace-time I was a single young man waiting for a dead man &apos;s shoes : in war I should be a keen young officer with a flying start in training and seniority . but I never heard a shot fired in anger , which accounts for a lot - particularly for my mental attitude today . I was in the war , but out of it . my experience is no more than that of the angry young men . in 1941 I was dangerously ill with pneumonia in Leeds Castle Hospital , near Maidstone . Andrew Smith , a subaltern with me in the same company before the war , was stationed in the town and looked after my mother when she came to visit me as the result of a dramatic telegram . let me be quite fair ; it was Harold Fennell who made all the arrangements for her journey , even providing her with a hired car - not easy in those days . it would probably be unkind , I think , to suggest that his motives were no better than mine when I was so regular in my attendance at church together with my uncle and aunt . after coming to see me , and learning that I was not reacting to drugs , Mother was sitting in her room at the hotel , feeling sad and close to tears . Andrew came to cheer her up . do n&apos;t worry , Mrs Street . you &apos;ll see . John will get better , they &apos;ll send him home , he &apos;ll meet some nice girl , get married , while I may well be killed . for some ten days I was very ill , out under morphia most of the time . I was well nursed - it makes all the difference in the world when they fill in your next-of-kin as mother and not wife . but the drugs were not having the right effect . once more , I do not expect you to believe what follows . I do not even defend what I am about to tell you . I am quite prepared to listen to rational explanations , to be told that it is coincidence , self-persuasion , a triumph of the human will . but what happened to me during that long illness must be told , plainly and simply . on the second Sunday that I was in hospital , during my morning period of consciousness , just after I had been washed , the hospital Chaplain came to my bed and asked if I would like to make my communion . I said I would . the screens were brought round . the Chaplain administered the sacrament . he prayed for my recovery and , as far as I was able , so did I . almost at once , I began to get better . and all the argument in dialectic materialism or progressive humanism or applied psychology will not convince me that I was not cured by a near-miracle . I had just gone through a bad patch of selfishness and disbelief . and I was still a stout protestant , with no great faith in the mystery of the Eucharist . in fact , only a few days before I was taken ill , I had been deliberately offensive to Father Stevenson , the Roman catholic priest attached to my company mess . I had tried to provoke him about the Anglo-Catholic church in the town where we were stationed . now that it is too late I regret my pride and bad manners and my narrow sectarian insolence . but Father Stevenson had more influence on me than he will ever know - coupled with my personal miracle at Maidstone . daily , hourly , I grew stronger . as soon as I was fit to be moved , I was transferred to a room on my own , and my eating utensils all had a piece of elastoplast stuck to them . the nurses would only answer my questions with tactful evasions . it &apos;s rather noisy for you in the ward . it &apos;s easier for us to attend to you . there is a larger night staff up here . but none of them convinced me . so it was no great shock when the senior physician told me that I had a spot on my lung , the result of the pneumonia , and that I was to be transferred to the British legion sanatorium at Preston Hall . yet it was still bad enough . the army was now my life : I had even been accused of out-soldiering the soldiers . I had enjoyed every minute , from wet hours in a slit trench to foot-stamping on a barrack square . the thought that I might have to leave the army in 1941 , with the war only half fought , was unbearable . in bed all day , on complete rest , I only caught an occasional glimpse of hollow-cheeked men who lived all the year in open huts in the grounds - men who knew only too well that phosgene smelt of musty hay , and mustard gas of garlic . for three months I lay on my back with nothing to do but look forward to the morning injections , and pray that I would not be discharged from the army . then I began to think . not just vaguely reminiscing , or idly speculating , but serious constructive thinking about all sorts of problems . a cousin sent me the weekend book , and I read poetry for pleasure for the first time . and it made me think again . then I began to write spasmodically - odd descriptions of things I had seen , little experiences , brief character sketches of people I had known . it was an important time for me , those three months in bed , more important than I have made it seem . it showed me that I had , within my own mind , a source of pleasure that had been stamped on in the past by rugger boots or riding boots or boots , brown , officer &apos;s pattern . 