It was said that Mr Jones had never seen the sea and that he believed the earth to be flat. I never knew his geographical views at first hand, and I would scarcely have dared to discover. For he was a formidable man, occasional of speech and always infallible. He spent his seventy years in one place, nearly all in one house indeed (apart from the irrelevant years of childhood, which in Mr Jones you could hardly believe had ever happened). He began as hall-boy in The Court in 1890, or thereabouts, with a wasp waistcoat and a proper respect for the protocol of place in a household of thirty servants. He lived to see much change, and when he died in 1952 the family he had served so long had moved to a much smaller house, The Court had become a school, and there were even council houses in the village.

But Mr Jones was more than a family retainer who had lived on into a world he could never really understand. He was fashioned, certainly, by the circumstances of time and place: the old General was the law and prophets for him, and there could be no countryside to match the gentle borderland, with the menacing mountains beyond. Yet he gave you a wonderful sense of the complete man, for whom change and decay could never seriously disturb the given order of things.