Although, as my sister was for ever telling me, I was too much addicted to self-dramatization, even I could hardly have over-dramatized, within myself, that summer afternoon departure from Newbury on the diesel train. It was carrying me away not only from my childhood and adolescence, never to return, but from an entire society and way of life, from everything I had experienced and come to know as familiar. The world would never be the same again.
