School started at 07:30 in the morning. We had a 50-minute period before breakfast and your schoolroom might be anywhere from five or six minutes away, so you were called at 07:00 by the... each house had about three maids chosen for their appalling hideousness in order to constitute no conceivable temptation to any of the boys. Any of the three of them would have put you off sex for life. And they went to call you at 07:00, then one usually stayed in bed until 25 minutes past and then somehow managed to get dressed and run to one’s classroom by about 07:30. And there were coffee and buns laid out downstairs, but nobody ever had time to have one. And then we came back for breakfast and then we had a short period before morning chapel, which Winston Churchill was so worried at the cancellation of, and then we went into our 50-minute lessons which succeeded each other.

Tuesdays and Thursdays and Saturdays were half-holidays, we didn’t have work in the afternoons then, but we had games which I... which I dreaded, I absolutely hated. Eton had its own special sort of football called the field game which I was absolutely hopeless at and the only goals I ever scored were those against my own side. And I used to dread that. And the cold, of course! Going for... walking for 10 minutes to the playing field and then taking off everything but your shirt... oh dear, I hated it so.