TEN
I read a lot as a youth, especially at the orphanage. Books were my escape from the unpleasant day-to-day reality. Indiscriminately, I gobbled them up: Dickens, Sapper, Conan Doyle, Rider Haggard, Trollope and Edgar Wallace. Other lives, other worlds, other adventures provided a welcome escape route from my dreary institutionalised life. I continued reading avidly until the outbreak of war when events seemed to rob me of my appetite for fiction. And losing an eye did not help. But in my late teens and early twenties I was a habitué of the Marylebone Library, snatching books off their shelves at least once a week. It felt strange, like a sentimental homecoming, to step back through the portals of this building again after a gap of three or four years.
It still smelt the same, that aro
