civilisations of the European system to which they were the key. (This
change was still so recent that he mentions an encounter in Rome with
an 'Oxford don' who 'spoke Latin with a Wiltshire accent and manifest
discomfort, wrote Greek letters with his tongue out, and seemed to think
a Greek sentence a charm when it was a quotation and an impropriety when
it wasn't.')

Barnet saw the last days of the coal-steam engines upon the English
railways and the gradual cleansing of the London atmosphere as the
smoke-creating sea-coal fires gave place to electric heating. The
building of laboratories at Kensington was still in progress, and he
took part in the students' riots that delayed the removal of the Albert
Memorial. He carried a banner with 'We like Funny Statuary' on one side,
and on the other 'Seats and Canopies for Statues, Why should our Great
Departed Stand in the Rain?' He learnt the rather athletic aviation of
those days at the University grounds at Sydenham, and he was fined for
flying over the new prison for political libellers at Wormwood Scrubs,
'in a manner calculated to exhilarate the prisoners while at exercise.'
That was the time of the attempted suppression of any criticism of the
public judicature and the place was crowded with journalists who had
ventured to call attention to the dementia of Chief Justice Abrahams.
Barnet was not a very good aviator, he confesses he was always a little
afraid of his machine--there was excellent reason for every one to
be afraid of those clumsy early types--and he never attempted steep
descents or very high flying. He also, he records, owned one of those
oil-driven motor-bicycles whose clumsy complexity and extravagant
filthiness still astonish the visitors to the museum of machinery at
South Kensington. He mentions running over a dog and complains of the
ruinous price of 'spatchcocks' in Surrey. 'Spatchcocks,' it seems, was a
slang term for crushed hens.