He had always had strong dreams. He had been sent away to a preparatory school at the age of eight – the school where his brother Marcus had spent five apparently contented years before him – and from the first had formed the habit of sleeping underneath his bed. He was not unhappy, he said, he had no complaints, but every night he would start off tucked up in bed like all the other boys in his dormitory and every night he would be found later by Matron on her last rounds crouched on the dusty boards underneath the bed. Nothing short of physical force would induce him to come out. Every afternoon he was beaten by the Headmaster for disobeying school rules (a rule about sleeping in rather than under beds having been hastily made to meet the occasion), and every night the same thing happened again. He was quite unable to explain himself. He felt better under there, was the most he would say. Finally the Headmaster wrote to his father and said that he was a disruptive influence in the school and that he had never come across a boy so hardened in his resistance to discipline. Osbert with his white face and long bony legs was settled at Nettleby to be tutored by the Vicar.

‘Sometimes Mr Fortescue is Mr Fortescue,’ he said to his grandmother once. ‘And sometimes when he is standing up and leaning over the desk to look at a Latin exercise on a sunny day he isn’t Mr Fortescue at all but something quite different, a sort of big black spidery thing.’

‘Now, Osbert darling, I do hope you are not going to become affected,’ Minnie had said. ‘Mr Fortescue is far too fat to be a spider.’

Another time he had been walking in the woods with Sir Randolph, and they had stopped to sit down on a fallen beech tree and Osbert had said, ‘Sometimes I dream of great huge turning circles, thick and blankety and slowly turning, and so, so big, and some have spikes on them and some are smooth and they go on and on for ever.’

‘Is that a nice dream?’

‘It’s awful. The most awful thing you can imagine.’

‘Did you ever dream about them when you were at school?’

‘Every night.’

‘But you never told anyone?’

‘In the day time I forgot them.’

Mr Fortescue found him polite but hopelessly forgetful. Ida wondered whether she should take him to see an expert: she had heard there was a man in Heidelberg who was very clever. Sir Randolph said, ‘Leave him alone. There’s no malice in him. Give him time and he’ll come along all right.’ He spoke as he might have spoken of one of his black, curly-coated retrievers, and like the retrievers Osbert in due course came along. Mr Fortescue found an unexpected interest in common with him; they both liked weak puns. At least, Mr Fortescue’s puns were weak. Osbert, by his irresponsible attitude towards the sense of the thing, occasionally achieved real wit – or as his grandmother put it ‘a jeu d’esprit’. It turned out that he had a memory after all and did not seem to mind memorizing lists of Latin vocabulary; the more remote from his own daily concerns the lessons he had to learn the more he liked them. Latin and Maths became his preferred subjects; Mr Fortescue soon saw no reason why he should not in due course follow his brother to Eton.