[Poetry] is a field where England can take on all challengers.

At school some learning by heart was compulsory, though not irksome. But this intake was out-distanced many times, as it always is among people who need poetry, by a private anthology, both of those automatically absorbed and of poems consciously chosen and memorized as though one were stocking up for a desert island or for a stretch of solitary.

I found it impossible to tear myself away from my station and plunge into Hungary. I feel the same disability now; a momentary reluctance to lay hands on this particular fragment of the future; not out of fear, but because, within arm's reach and still intact, this future seemed, and still seems, so full of promised marvels.

My mother was filled with apprehension to begin with; we pored over the atlas, and, bit by bit as we pored, the comic possibilities began to unfold in absurd imaginary scenes until we were falling about with laughter; and by the time I caught the train to London next morning, she was infected with my excitement.

The notion that I had walked twelve hundred miles since Rotterdam filled me with a legitimate feeling of something achieved. But why should the thought that nobody knew where I was, as though I were in flight from bloodhounds or from worshipping corybants bent on dismemberment, generate such a feeling of triumph? It always did.

I fell asleep among the beer mugs and when I woke, I couldn’t think where I was.