Book is dedicated to his wife, "who has shared all of it."

John born 1906, moved to Yorkshire at age 6.

"For generations the Wolfendens had lived up on the Lancashire border." John born in Wiltshire, Swindon -- his father had moved there, "breaking away from a close-knit family of seven children"
said FATHER of JOHN WOLFENDEN was Registrar of the Swibdon Technical College, but "returned to the West Riding to a job in the Education Department at the County Hall in Wakefield." He "steadily moved up the office ladder" and had "a remarkable career for a boy who left school at twelve to become a 'part-timer'." - a "remarkable man, in a quiet, soft-spoken, God-fearing way. He had his flashes of temper, but his family, his work, and his chapel were his full life." - later, "a writer of short stories in West Yorkshire dialect"
the MOTHER of JOHN WOLFENDEN: "very different." Her parents (the MATERNAL GRANDPARENTS of JOHN) died before John was born, "but I knew her two brother and younger sister." She was "pretty, elegant, and tasteful. She dressed very well, on what must have been minute expenditure... She certainly had what were called social ambitions, and she was sensitive enough to model her behavior accordingly. My father never ceased to be proud of her. I doubt if she enjoyed the return to Yorkshire as much as he did." (page 1-2, numbered 9-10) [Commentary: my own grandparents (60-70s, so about 50 years later) had a similar dynamic, both wives forfeiting more education for the husband to continue -- paternally, the wife was the major factor in the move south, but maternally the husband's job determined location.]
the MATERNAL GRANDFATHER of JOHN : "had a greengrocer's shop in a suburb of Halifax" (1, marked pg 11)
"For generations we had been Methodists (Weslayan, not Primitive) and all my grandparents' sons were Chapel Stewards or Circuit Stewards or local preachers." (pg 11) in context of him attending a Church of England school. Note, he may have meant only his paternal grandparents, given the primacy of paternal lineage at the time.

The family could not easily afford railway fares when they lived distant from the greater Wolfenden clan.

"But at the age of six one takes what comes, whether it be the loss of a younger brother who died of meningitis when I was five and hewas four, or the first sight of a flying-machine, or the news of the sinking of the Titanic. (The first public event I remember is the death of King Edward VII when I was four:I could not understand why the newspaper on a particular day hada thick black line round the pages.)" pg 10

"I suppose, in retrospect, I had very few friends of my own age. I was strongly discouraged from playing with the children lower down the road..." (pg 11)

"In Swindon I had attended a dame's school. It was the genuine and authentic article, conducted for eight or ten of us by two maiden ladies in a shed at the bottom of their garden in one of the best parts of Swindon. Heaven knows what their qualifications were, or how I came to go there. {see: o si sic omnes} The fact that I chewed off the corners of the grammar book may well have some sinister esoteric explanation: the taste of the resulting juice remains.
To be pitchforked from this into a Churck of England elementary school in Wakefield might have been traumatic - perhaps it was, in ways of which I am not concious.I had never before been in a classroom, with thirty-five other boys and girls, seated with due sex segregation[...] I had never lined up in due order, standing on a marked spot on the assembly hall floor, for monging prayers at the beginning of the day." (11)

Suspected that his placement at a Church of England school despite his family's contrary religious practices was because of the particular school's reputation for securing "free places at the Grammar School". (12)

Was a "freak" among his peers -- opposite accents, John had "the Southern long 'a' and short 'u'"

Real class mobility in education from the start -- parents had no "formal schooling worth mentioning" but John attended what seems to have been a series of well-to-do schools and is one of three in a cohort to attempt, & obtain, scholarship - Lady Elizabeth Hastings - still around?

"Cambridge was a fate worse than death, like Lancashire." - pg 26

pg 27 "There was one pitfall about having an Oxford scholarship in the bag as early in the academic year as November. There was the whole of the rest of the school year to live through until the foloowing July. In the 1970s there is no problem: there are VSO and CSV and any number of other ways of occupying, with pleasure and rapid increase in maturity, a God-given interval of six or nine months at that stage. Fifty years ago there were no such opportunities." "It took me three separate competatuve examinations to collect enough money to face a university carreer without cost to my parents." - Akroyd Scholarship and City Major Scholarship

page 48 first mention of Jeremy: talks about how Washington DC is a disginuished and beautiful city, "Subsequent visits have done nothing to dim or diminish the first impression of outward serenity — not even the one my wife and I paid nearly forty years later for the funeral of our elder son who had died there."

page 57: "One of the bravest things I ever did was to teach him to drive a car: he had an unnerving faith in the efficacy of prayer."

o si sic omnes - "What I do remember is being taught the elements of English grammar and the necessity for correct spelling: o si sic omnes!" - Oh, if only all were thus/like this