‘I am now in my twenty-second year and yet the only birthday which I can clearly distinguish among all the rest was my twelfth, for it was on that damp and misty day in September that I met the Captain for the first time. I can still remember the wetness of the gravel under my gym shoes in the school quad and how the blown leaves made the cloisters by the chapel slippery as I ran recklessly to escape from my enemies between one class and the next. I slithered and came to an abrupt halt while my pursuers went whistling away, because there in the middle of the quad stood our formidable headmaster talking to a tall man in a bowler hat, a rare sight already at that date so that he looked a little like an actor in costume – an impression not so far wrong, for I never saw him in a bowler hat again.’