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By Root 3000 0

than might be supposed. In my father’s case, this dislike for thought seemed to stem from a basic conviction that his childhood had been an unhappy one. His melancholy was comparable, even though less eccentrically expressed, with Bracey’s, no doubt contributing to their mutual understanding. Much the youngest of his family, his claim to have been neglected was probably true. Happy marriage did not cure him. Painfully sensitive to criticism, he was never (though he might not show this) greatly at ease with other men; in that last characteristic resembling not a few of those soldiers, who, paradoxically, reach high rank, positively assisted by their capacity for avoiding friendship, too close personal ties which can handicap freedom of ascent.

‘These senior officers are like a lot of ballerinas,’ said my friend Pennistone, when, years later, we were in the army together.

Certainly the tense nerves of men of action – less notorious than those of imaginative men – are not to be minimised. This was true of my father, who, like many persons who believe primarily in the will – although his own will was in no way remarkable – hid in his heart a hatred of constituted authority. He did his best to conceal this antipathy, because the one thing he hated, more than constituted authority itself, was to hear constituted authority questioned by anyone but himself. This is perhaps an endemic trait in all who love power, and my father had an absolute passion for power, although he was never in a position to wield it on a notable scale. In his own house, only he himself was allowed to criticise – to use a favourite phrase of his –’the powers that be’. In private, he would, for example, curse the Army Council (then only recently come into existence); in the presence of others, even those ‘in the Service’ with whom he was on the best of terms, he would defend to the last ditch official policy of which in his heart he disapproved.

These contradictory veins of feeling placed my father in a complex position vis-à-vis General Conyers, whom Uncle Giles, on the other hand, made no secret of finding ‘a bit too pleased with himself’. As a much older man, universally recognised as a first-rate soldier, the General presented a figure to whom deference on my father’s part was obviously due. At the same time, the General held revolutionary views on army reform, which he spared no opportunity of voicing in terms utterly uncomplimentary to ‘the powers that be’, military or civil. My father, of course, possessed his own especial likes and dislikes throughout the hierarchy of the army, both individual and general, but deplored too plain speaking even when he was to some considerable extent in agreement.

“Aylmer Conyers is fond of putting everyone right,’ he used to complain. ‘If he’d stayed in the Service a few years longer, instead of devoting his life to training poodles as gun-dogs, and scraping away at that ‘cello of his, he might have discovered that the army has changed a little since the Esher Report.’

Uncle Giles would immediately have been reproved for making so open a criticism of a senior officer, but my father must have felt that to criticise General Conyers was the only method of avoiding apparent collusion in an attack on the whole Army Council. In any case, Uncle Giles’s unsatisfactory mode of life, not to mention his dubious political opinions, radical to the point of anarchism, put him out of court in most family discussions. He was at this period employed in a concern fascinatingly designated a ‘bucket-shop’. My father had, in truth, never forgiven his brother for transferring himself, years before – after some tiff with his commanding officer – to the Army Service Corps.

‘It’s not just snobbishness on my part,’ my father used to say, long after Uncle Giles had left that, and every other, branch of the army. ‘I know they win a lot of riding events at gymkhanas, but I can’t stick ’em. They’re such an unco-operative lot of beggars when you have to deal with ’em about stores. I date all Giles’s troubles from leaving his regiment.’

However,