ABSTRACT
In September 1936, aged thirteen and a half, I entered public school at Stowe and stayed there until December 1940. Despite the wreck of my family life, or perhaps because of it, I remember feeling much at home there almost from the first day. My “house,” which bore the secondary ducal name of Chandos, occupied the eastern half of the east wing of the great country mansion of the former dukes of Buckingham; several of the most famous architects of the eighteenth century had played some part in building it. The “house room,” where the younger boys did their preparation and spent their leisure hours, had been the easternmost of the long sequence of state rooms on the south front of the building designed by Robert Adam, and its windows commanded the splendid vista that “Capability” Brown had created at the beginning of his career as a landscape gardener to the aristocracy. It descended between beech groves to the Octagon Lake and rose beyond it to the Corinthian Arch, which led to the double avenue of oak trees lining the road to Buckingham and the south. My first dormitory was high up in the same wing in what I suppose once was a servants' room, its windows looking west across the rooftops to the pediment of Vanburgh's portico, where a huge clock rang out the quarters in tones of uncompromising solemnity. The three names on the door, in alphabetical order, were Monaco, Oliver, and Phillips.
