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famous movies; if she should be the same she will remember Fred Norway, who at the age of seventeen proposed to her on top of a Dublin tram and was rejected very kindly while she twisted her tram ticket nervously to pieces, and who died of wounds in France two years later. If not, perhaps she will forgive me.
    Round the next corner and in the next street
  Adventure lies in wait for you.
Oh, who can tell what you may meet
  Round the next corner and in the next street!
Could life be anything but sweet
  When all is hazardous and new?
Round the next corner and in the next street
  Adventure lies in wait for you.
    That isn’t mine; I wish it was. It was written by E. F. A. Geach at Oxford a few years after the time of which I am writing, and to me it epitomises those years before the first war, and my early youth. It may not be good poetry to the critics of such matters, but it has pleased me for nearly thirty-five years.
    In the spring of 1913 I left Lynams’ and went to Shrewsbury School, into Oldham’s house. Shrewsbury at that time was a fine school on the up-grade under a vigorous and imaginative young headmaster, C. A. Alington, and Oldham’s was the newest and one of the best houses in the school. I made many friends there who are close friends still, not least my old housemaster. On form the years that I spent there should have been a very happy time, and when I say that they were not I am saying nothing against Shrewsbury. I had been there little over a year when war broke out, in August 1914, and the remainder of my time at school was mostly spent in preparation for war till finally my own turn came, and I left school, and went to war myself.
    In those circumstances I don’t think any school could possibly have been a very happy place, resilient though youth may be. I was in uniform already when the war broke out because, like most boys, I belonged to the school Officers’ Training Corps and the end of the summer term found me in the annual training camp at Rugeley. Thatwas a tented camp shared with contingents from many other schools under their own masters as officers, where a few regular army officers put us through manœuvres on a considerable scale based, of course, entirely upon Boer War tactics. Britain mobilised when we had been there only a few days and the regular officers and cooks and orderlies marched off more or less directly to France, and we were sent home, still in our khaki uniforms, all terribly excited.
    When I got back to my home in Ireland I found that Fred had already applied for a commission in the army. He failed his medical and had to have a minor operation before going up again; in the meantime my father had had time to think it over and decided that Fred had better go in for a commission in the regular army so that if the war went on for years he would have a profession when it was over. Fred was very much annoyed about this because he reckoned that if he messed around too long he’d miss the war, but my father was adamant and Fred passed into Sandhurst in October 1914. In those days the sausage machine worked quickly, and by April 1915 Fred was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry, Cornwall being our family county.
    We had a motor bicycle between us by that time, a new Rudge Multi. My parents must have been very wise to launch out on this extravagance at a time when my father must have foreseen rising taxation, for the Rudge cost nearly £60, a lot of money in those days. Although completely unmechanical himself, my father saw good sense in Fred’s contention that every officer ought to know something about motors, revolutionary though that doctrine seemed. My mother had another angle on it; she foresaw that in the holidays my life would be empty without Fred since we had been so much together, and she thought that if I had a motor bicycle while Fred was away at the war itwould ease the loneliness. So in September 1914 when I was