From what a man is, springs all that he does. The being Hilaire Belloc, a person of very much larger than life size, a natural portent, vivid, roaring, and exciting as a thunderstorm, was present to me long before I knew anything about his work, even the Moral Alphabet and the Bad Child's Book of Beasts which were kept in the back drawing-room and later filled us with a fearful joy as intense as that inspired by their creator. He had always been there: a grown man who liked children, and who could be observed with delicious awe to behave very badly, according to the standards of Nanny. We did not then know he had created an entirely apocryphal legend that there hung in our quiet rationalist nursery a card bearing the words, illuminated like a text, ‘No Rot About God’; but we were acutely conscious that he did many other agreeably outrageous things. He shouted with laughter whenever he felt like it; he sometimes sang in the street as he walked along; he went into pubs; and once there was talk of his being tried in a court of justice for something he had put in a paper, talk which led me to visualise him as chained by the leg in a dark stone cell in the Tower of London, with a jailer looking in once a day to bring him a stale loaf and a jug (the large white enamelled sort used in bathrooms) of tap-water. This must have been at the time of the Marconi case libel action.

He had always been there; yet the natural self-centredness of childhood made him seem real only when he flashed through our humdrum ambience like a shooting star. To go to King’s Land where he lived under the downs was for the first time to perceive him as a giant with a house, a family, a way of living quite independent of our own, continuing when we were not there to see.