ABSTRACT
During the spring of 1954 Caroline and I decided with infinite regret that we ought to dispose of the pretty cottage at Woughton-on-the-Green that we had rescued from ruin and had been our happy home for ten years. Sarah had reached school age. Caroline looked forward to pursuing her interests in a less sequestered environment. And I had a profession that was ramifying into a whole range of extracurricular activities and increasingly demanded a London base. Caroline did the hunting and came up with a solution we thought we could just afford, in Newton Road, W.2., a street of rather elegant small, very early Victorian houses in an otherwise insalubrious part of Bayswater, off Westbourne Grove. Our neighbours there were nearly all people of our own kind. The Hancocks we already knew. Daphne and Desmond Crawley, with their two children, came and went in between diplomatic postings to various Commonwealth capitals. John Scott, then the literary editor of the Spectator, lived there with his wife Helen and two boys of Sarah's age. Ronald Searle, the artist and children's author, lived and worked there with Kay, who ran the children's department of Penguin Books. Eldred Hitchcock, the sisal king of Tanganyika, owned two adjacent houses occupied by his wife and children, although during his almost fortnightly visits to London he was generally to be found in a suite at the Ritz. There was a village life for the adults and for the children a street gang that met after school hours on most days to play cricket against the lamp posts or to be drilled by Oliver Scott in preparation for raids planned against the children of Kildare Gardens, which fortunately were never executed.
