tion....

I think this statement does my boyhood justice, and yet I have my
doubts. It is so hard now to say what one understood and what one did
not understand. It isn't only that every day changed one's general
outlook, but also that a boy fluctuates between phases of quite adult
understanding and phases of tawdrily magnificent puerility. Sometimes
I myself was in those tumbrils that went along Cheapside to the Mansion
House, a Sydney Cartonesque figure, a white defeated Mirabean; sometimes
it was I who sat judging and condemning and ruling (sleeping in
my clothes and feeding very simply) the soul and autocrat of the
Provisional Government, which occupied, of all inconvenient places! the
General Post Office at St. Martin's-le-Grand!...

I cannot trace the development of my ideas at Cambridge, but I believe
the mere physical fact of going two hours' journey away from London gave
that place for the first time an effect of unity in my imagination. I
got outside London. It became tangible instead of being a frame almost
as universal as sea and sky.

At Cambridge my ideas ceased to live in a duologue; in exchange for
Britten, with whom, however, I corresponded lengthily, stylishly and
self-consciously for some years, I had now a set of congenial friends. I
got talk with some of the younger dons, I learnt to speak in the Union,
and in my little set we were all pretty busily sharpening each other's
wits and correcting each other's interpretations. Cambridge made
politics personal and actual. At City Merchants' we had had no sense
of effective contact; we boasted, it is true, an under secretary and a
colonial governor among our old boys, but they were never real to
us; such distinguished sons as returned to visit the old school were
allusive and pleasant in the best Pinky Dinky style, and pretended to
be in earnest about nothing but our football and cricket, to mourn the
abolition of "water," and find a shuddering personal interest in the
ancient swishing block. At Cambridge I felt for the first time that I
touched the thing that was going on. Real living statesmen came down to
debate in the Union, the older dons had been their college intimates,
their sons and nephews expounded them to us and made them real to us.
They invited us to entertain ideas; I found myself for the first time
in my life expected to read and think and discuss, my secret vice had
become a virtue.

That combination-room world is at last larger and mo