note to self: go back and record parents & grandparents named jobs

grew up in one of those British townhouses that are all squished together (but end of the line)

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."