The difficulty was to bowl him before he got caught. He loved to
lift a ball to leg. After one had clean bowled him at the practice
nets one deliberately gave him a ball to leg just to make him feel
nice again.

Flack went about a world of marvels dreaming of leg hits. He has
been observed, going across the Park on his way to his highly
respectable club in Piccadilly, to break from profound musings into
a strange brief dance that ended with an imaginary swipe with his
umbrella, a roofer, over the trees towards Buckingham Palace. The
hit accomplished, Flack resumed his way.

Inadequately instructed foreigners would pass him in terror,
needlessly alert.


6

These schoolmasters move through my memory as always a little
distant and more than a little incomprehensible. Except when they
wore flannels, I saw them almost always in old college caps and
gowns, a uniform which greatly increased their detachment from the
world of actual men. Gates, the head, was a lean loose-limbed man,
rather stupid I discovered when I reached the Sixth and came into
contact with him, but honest, simple and very eager to be liberal-
minded. He was bald, with an almost conical baldness, with a
grizzled pointed beard, small featured and, under the stresses of a
Zeitgeist that demanded liberality, with an expression of puzzled
but resolute resistance to his own unalterable opinions. He made a
tall dignified figure in his gown. In my junior days he spoke to me