‘When Colin March, a younger son of the famous diplomatist, played in a British Embassy garden abroad, his foreign nurse gave him a tortoise. “A useful beast,” she explained, “it devours cockroaches; they are its passion.” Colin wanted to see this beneficent passion at work. So he captured one of the Embassy’s many cockroaches and put it down in front of the tortoise’s nose, like an early Christian presented to a lion. The tortoise eyed the offered feast, and mused deeply. The cockroach did not muse. It was a cockroach of action. Without any apparent need for reflection it bolted for cover, like a flash of blackness, right into the tortoise’s shell, and hid itself in that profounder thinker’s armpit.

‘The cadet of a dynasty of ambassadors was charmed with the cockroach’s wit. He filed the whole affair in a pigeon-hole of his ‘cute little mind. As he grew up, he would often chuckle to think of it. Piquant parallels would occur to him. For a fox to go to earth under the kennels, for landsmen to put to sea to escape from a press-gang, for cannon-fodder to hide at the back of the cannon—this was the wisdom of life put into a kind of practical epigram, salt and impudent.’