No, no, I was never a friend of Eliot’s. But I was being published by Faber & Faber when they lived grandly in a corner of Russell Square. There, thinking how staggeringly fortunate I was, I would talk to Charles Monteith, and was induced to go upstairs and  talk to Eliot.

My goodness!  Eliot was at that time the very captain – the admiral – of all cultural fleets, in British waters and far beyond. You might say, wherever roars life’s boundless ocean.

“I grow old, I grow old.  I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled…”  We all quoted it, all said it, and there I was, entering his room at the top of the Faber fortress.  Eliot stood there and talked. I stood there and did not talk. Eliot’s room contained two fine framed portraits. Over the fireplace hung a pencil portrait of Eliot while on the wall opposite hung another splendid pencil portrait, this one of Ezra Pound.

Some publishing houses were still family businesses. Sir Geoffrey Faber was still active and T.S.Eliot was on the board. Sir Geoffrey took me on long drives into the country, to seek out shops selling antiques. His daughter came too. The company then lived in Russell Square, and my affairs came under the newly appointed Charles Monteith, a great man, a jovial member of All Souls, at Oxford. Charles had just discovered William Golding, and Golding’s magic island.

These people were grand and new and I flourished in their distinguished company. I sometimes climbed the faberian stairs and entered the offices of T.S.Eliot. Talking with him was rather like enduring a church service; but while I trembled I surveyed his two magnificent portraits in pencil by Wyndham Lewis, of Eliot on one side of the room and Ezra Pound on the other, high above our heads.

Eventually I moved to Jonathan Cape. I really forget why. Maybe Charles had died, Charles who had fought and been seriously wounded in the Arakan in Burma.