e
sunlight falls upon me and throws the shadow of my window mullion across
the page, that Peter, my cat, sleeps on the window-seat close at hand
and that this agate paper-weight with the silver top that once was
Henley's holds my loose memoranda together. Outside is a patch of lawn
and then a fringe of winter-bitten iris leaves and then the sea, greatly
wrinkled and astir under the south-west wind. There is a boat going out
which I think may be Jim Pain's, but of that I cannot be sure...

These are statements of a certain quality, a quality that extends
through a huge universe in which I find myself placed.

I try to recall how this world of fact arose in my mind. It began with a
succession of limited immediate scenes and of certain minutely perceived
persons; I recall an underground kitchen with a drawered table, a window
looking up at a grating, a back yard in which, growing out by a dustbin,
was a grape-vine; a red-papered room with a bookcase over my father's
shop, the dusty aisles and fixtures, the regiments of wine-glasses and
tumblers, the rows of hanging mugs and jugs, the towering edifices
of jam-pots, the tea and dinner and toilet sets in that emporium, its
brighter side of cricket goods, of pads and balls and stumps. Out of the
window one peeped at the more exterior world, the High Street in front,
the tailor's garden, the butcher's yard, the churchyard and Bromley
church tower behind; and one was taken upon expeditions to fields
and open places. This limited world was peopled with certain familiar
presences, mother and father, two brothers, the evasive but interesting
cat, and by intermittent people of a livelier but more transient
interest, customers and callers.

Such was my opening world of fact, and each day it enlarged and widened
and had more things added to it. I had soon won my way to speech and was
hearing of facts beyond my visible world of fact. Presently I was at a
Dame's school and learning to read.

From the centre of that little world as primary, as the initiatory
material, my perception of the world of fact widened and widened, by new
sights and sounds, by reading and hearing descriptions and histories, by
guesses and inferences; my curiosity and interest, my appetite for fact,
grew by what it fed upon, I carried on my expansion of the world of fact
until it took me through the mineral and fossil galleries of the
Natural History Museum, through the geological drawers of the College of
Sci