The house that I found was the right thing. As soon as I saw it, it fitted neatly into some ready-made notch: it was an ordinary nineteenth-century terrace house in Islington, and on either side of the front door stood a small stone lion. Inside it had been modernized by a young couple who had since made a lot of money and moved off into a more fashionable area. It was all right: nothing remarkable, except for the plaster ceilings and one good ornate fireplace. But the back garden was up to the standard of the lions. It was surrounded by a high brick wall, but from the upstairs rooms one could see it and all the gardens in the row, and the impression was of old brick and shoots of greenery and grass and daffodils. Our garden was all weeds, but the one next door on the right had been looked after to perfection by an old man who had lived in the house through all the permutations of the area, from its days of respectable solidarity, the days in which Dickens refers to “shady Pentonville,” through the shabby slip into dusty urban poverty and back once more into the classless rise of chi-chi that David and myself quite adequately represented. His garden was a perpetual delight: the grass was mown and even, flowers grew at every season in every corner and the walls were covered with every variety of climbing, blossoming plant.

In the street in front of the houses there was nothing but dust and hard brick and cars and dirty children. One would never have guessed what secret foliage grew behind that stony frontage.

I know that my attachment to such things and the importance that they assume for me verge in the eyes of others on the irresponsible. I am not happy that the opinion of such people should be bad, but I am made how I am made. Throughout my life I have been accused of snobbery, in some form or another, and I do not like it, I wish it were not so. I have no desire to exclude; on the contrary, I would rather include, I would rather at every moment recognize, and am I to blame that the occasions on which I can do so are so rare? I suppose that I am to blame. I carry a great weight of blame around with me, the price of my distinctions; but I will go on carrying it, for to cease to distinguish is an impossibility, and I will traffic only in possibilities and facts.