Some Talk of Alexander

II was first pitched into history when my father, who was British, was invited to return to London, by Shell, for a year’s experience of higher management, in the summer of 1938. Our arrival coincided with Neville Chamberlain going to Munich. I sensed the ashamed relief of most of Britain when he returned to wave that scrap of paper which Beaverbrook’s Daily Express promised entailed ‘Peace In Our Time’.

The war came before we were due to return to the United States. My father thought it his duty to remain in London, and force majeure converted me into an English schoolboy. My first prize, from a little school in Putney, was Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tanglewood Tales, a sanitized version of Greek myths, purged not only of any erotic aspect but even of alcohol: the pitcher which their grateful guests, Zeus and Hermes, gave to Baucis and Philemon, was revised as being magically refilled with ‘milk’, not wine. Yet even the Puritan version of the paedophile Theseus and the cross-dressing Heracles was immediately more thrilling than Huck Finn or insipid stories about Heidi.