My father, who had more capacity for being cheated than any man I have ever known, was badly cheated by his builders; the drains were wrong, the chimneys were wrong, and there was a draught in every room. But Oldie could boast an impressive record of scholarships in the past. Unfortunately, once her presence was withdrawn, the good effects withered and the bad ones remained. I first read Tamburlaine while travelling from Larne to Belfast in a thunderstorm, and first read Browning's Paracelsus by a candle which went out and had to be re-lit whenever a big battery fired in a pit below me, which I think it did every four minutes all that night. Less than a mile from our home stood the largest house I then knew, which I will here call Mountbracken, and there lived Sir W.
nest...