We used to have breakfast on a high verandah outside our bedrooms, off tiny little eggs and equally small fresh bananas.
At luncheon the whole of the diplomatic staff used to be present, and usually guests as well. The news came to Cairo that I had failed to pass the examination, in geography and arithmetic. Claud Russell, I think, qualified, and was given a vacancy later.
In the evening my uncle used sometimes to read us passages of abuse about himself in the local press. One phrase which described him as combining the oiliness of a Chadband with the malignity of a fiend delighted him. He gave us the MSS. of his book, _Modern Egypt_, which was then only partly written, to read. He was never tired of discussing books: the Classics, French novels, the English poets of the eighteenth century. He could not endure the verse of Robert Browning. His admiration for French prose was unbounded and for the French gift of expression in general, their newspaper articles, their speeches, and, above all, their acting.
Sometimes we rode to the Pyramids, and one day we had tea with Wilfrid and Lady Anne Blunt in their Arab house.
We did not stay long in Cairo; we went up the Nile. The first part of the journey, to a station whose name I forget, was by train; and once, when the train stopped in the desert, the engine-driver brought Claud Russell a copybook and asked him to correct an English exercise he had just done. Claud said how odd we should think it if in England the engine-driver brought us an exercise to correct.
Then we embarked in the M.S. _Cleopatra_ and steamed to Luxor, where we saw the sights: the tombs of the kings, the temple of Carnac, the statue of Memnon. We bathed in the Nile, and smoked hashish.
We were back in Europe by Christmas, and spent Christmas night in the waiting-room of Turin railway station playing chess; and when we arrived in London the momentous question arose, what was I to do to pass the examination? We were only allowed three tries, and my next attempt would be my last chance.
The large staff of teachers who were cramming me were in despair. I was told I must pass the next time.
The trouble was that the standard of arithmetic demanded by this examination was an elementary standard, and I had now twice attained by cramming a pitch I knew I should never surpass. At Scoones’ they said my only chance lay in getting an easy paper. It was said that my work had been wrong not in degree but in kind. I had merely wasted time by reading Renan and Mommsen; other candidates, who had never read a German book in their lives, by learning lists of words got more marks than I did. Herr Dittel, who gave me private lessons in German, said that he could have sent a German essay of mine to a German magazine. But not knowing the German for “belligerent,” I was beaten by others who knew the language less well. The same applied to the French in which I was only second, although perhaps in some ways the best French scholar among the candidates.