Going to boarding school had furnished me with the initial opportunity for reacting with my peer group to discover who was dominant over another. The classroom was less of a crucial arena than the dormitories. And at Ludgrove, `the earlybedders' filled three special dormitories, with a different time schedule than the elder boys.

There were about five of us new kids during my first term in Dorm 27, alongside the dormitory monitor. In that the latter only joined us at a later hour, for much of the time we had to work out our own rules for interplay. Invariably there was one individual more than the next who was apt to suggest such rules, or even to be left in charge of a situation by Matron, or her assistants.

It was some advantage having an elder brother, in that his authority could be evoked in the event of a dispute. And there was always Munster whom I regarded somewhat in that vein, although I was never quite sure if he would really back me up if we all appealed to his better judgement. Morrison on the other hand quite genuinely possessed an elder brother. So he initially dominated our group. But I was much concerned on this issue of wanting to see that my rules, rather than someone else's were those that were adopted. And during my second term, in Dorm 28 this time and in different company, I prided myself on the idea that I was perhaps dominant.

It was also a question of seeing that the new kids knew their place, in relation to those who had been at the school for longer. They must learn not to be cheeky: a matter that would be corrected by physical chastisement if the offence were repeated too often. But there was also a taboo against the idea of bullying. All of these matters required a delicate assessment of what should be judged permissible, and what discouraged. There was also the whole pecking order to consider. And I learnt as quickly as the next person, whom it was that I might be entitled to peck, and whose authority should be accepted without demur.

Then came the question of who was dominant at Sturford, within the home environment. I never disputed Cal's authority. Our original training on the question of hierarchy was too strong for me. Nor did I ever feel any challenge to me from either of my younger brothers on that score. But while Daddy was away there in the Middle East, there was a general loss of control over what took place at home - due largely to the war situation. We weren't quite as much as before the masters in our own home.

There were the evacuees, for example. The crippled children hadn't stayed with us for very long, but the authorities soon lodged us with the [E] family who came from London's East End. I was at Ludgrove when they had first arrived, only discovering that all was not well from Nan and Chris, when returning home for the holidays. Chris informed me how these children had laughed at his discomfiture, when he took a step backwards to end up with a foot in the pond - on his first sight of them playing in the same garden as himself. And Nanny was full of tales about their territorial infringement, causing her to shout at them frequently from the nursery window forbidding them to trespass.

The situation had become notably worse after Nanny had taken on the eldest of the [E] children, to come and do the washing-up in the nursery. It had been an experiment without any chance of success. Coming from where they did, they knew next to nothing of the feudal culture which existed deep in the heart of Wessex, and the whole idea of domestic service was utterly foreign to their natures. And when it came to Nanny laying down the law, on behalf of this family who seemed to think they were so much above everyone else, then young Miss [E] wasn't going to stand for it. She endured the job for less than a week, and then never appeared again. Indeed, this was the last occasion that Nan had any young girl to work for her, so the desertion rankled deeply. Thereafter, for the most part, she had to perform such menial tasks herself.

I daresay that [E] was about fifteen, (a biggish young woman,) and her three sisters were some years younger: perhaps around eight, nine and ten. What irritated greatly from our own point of view was the way in which these evacuees seemed to be poking fun at us upon our own territory. The younger ones would stick their faces under the macrocarpa hedge, which separated the front garden from the kitchen entrance to Sturford - making faces at us while Chris and I were riding our bicycles upon the lawn. We had made the occasional bicycle charge in their direction, to drive them away. But they regarded the hedge as the demarcation of their own bastion and, after retreating, they would invariably return, as aggressively cheeky as ever.

Well the day arrived when we were feeling more pugnacious than usual. The Gilmour family was visiting, and Sandy (who was about two years older than myself) was surprised that we let them get away with such cheek. So in an atmosphere of showing off to one another, we were soon involved in a hue and cry, racing round on our bicycles to cut off their retreat from under the macrocarpa hedge. They ran screaming, and it was now our turn to jeer.

If we had left the matter there, it would have counted as a great success. Unfortunately in the full flush of victory, we pressed forward, abandoning our bicycles and chasing them on foot until they took refuge behind the door into the basement, where their own quarters were situated. This they bolted in our faces, and we stood there clamouring for their blood on the outside - with no specific idea in mind as to what we should do if we got hold of them. But it came as a big surprise to all of us when the door suddenly opened, and there stood Miss [E], totally unabashed by our numbers, and demanding to know what it was that we wanted.

She neatly side-tracked the issue of whether or not her sisters had the right to make faces at us from under the macrocarpa hedge, by suggesting that our problem was that we seemed to think we were better than they. We were thus enticed into making our stand on that issue, jeering at them for being "just girls". Miss [E] declared boldly that she was quite prepared to have a fight with us, if that is what we wanted - which of course we didn't. She was certainly bigger than any of the males I had fought, and fighting a girl (even if I turned out to be stronger) wasn't really a situation that might bring any credit to us. So we felt obliged to withdraw, after flinging a few more bravado taunts in her direction.

But there was now a distinct antipathy between the two families, and there seemed so little that we could do about it, to persuade them to seek their accommodation elsewhere. I thought that this was a situation where I had the rest of my family fully in my support. So when I caught a rat in the garden, after killing it, I shoved it down through the grill through which the [E] family received their light and their ventilation of air. And some days after performing this feat, I boasted to Daphne about what I had done, suggesting that the smell of the decaying rat must surely precipitate their departure.

I was now quite alarmed to discover that she felt I had overstepped the bounds of fair play. Or in any case, I ought to have judged that if the [E] family caught the plague (or whatever it is that one might catch from dead rats,) then the infection might spread to our own family. No, on the grounds of good sanitation, I would have to go down into the basement and retrieve the rotting corpse from their ventilation shaft: a performance which cost me acute embarrassment, even though I was accompanied by Mr Harris, the head gardener, to give me moral support - although I daresay that his true sympathies were on the other side.

In its way however, the protest was effective in that the [E] family did quite soon depart. And Daphne was more careful thenceforward, to refrain from such public-spirited war effort in offering any portion of Sturford for the use of displaced persons. Not that this left us problem-free, since it was always difficult nowadays to find enough staff to run the place. And we did have some experience of the kind of person who got sent to us from the reserve pool of labour at the work exchange.

One who arrived to fill the post of butler looked at first sight almost ideal for the job, with a set of butler's clothes which convinced us that his tales of a wide experience in this profession must be genuine. But there were also rumours that he had suffered from mental illness, which might explain why he wasn't being required to contribute more valuably towards the war effort. And our conviction that this might be the explanation increased as the days went by. His reminiscences about service in aristocratic homes proliferated until it reached a point when Daphne at least knew that he was telling fibs. And she felt alarmed to the point of discomfort, when he insisted on rushing up to give a tug downwards at her skirt, so that it wouldn't have a crease when she sat down at the dining-room table.

My own experience of his oddity occurred when he came to sit with me and Chris, beside the pond on a sunny day. One of the crazes at Ludgrove had been to ignite a newspaper by focusing the sun's rays through a magnifying glass and, naturally enough, I had also felt the pain that it could cause on my naked hand. So trying to be funny, I suppose, I applied the rays of the magnifying glass to his hand, outstretched on the grass and unsuspecting, while he was feeding us with more of his bogus stories about those capers with the nobility.

I was taken quite by surprise in that he didn't take it as a mild practical joke, but leapt up with a cry of anguish, or pain, and started pursuing me round the lawn, having grabbed the magnifying glass from my hand, demonically intent upon some tit-for-tat operation. It was just a case of over-reaction, I daresay. Yet it struck all of us that he wasn't the same type of person that we'd employed in the days before the war disrupted everything.

We had another problem too, in that during the days gone by, it was Daddy rather than Mummy who would have dealt with any such dismissal. And this particular individual was quite charismatic, in his own sort of way. Not for the first time, Daphne flinched from such a task. So Mr Gill was left to perform the dishonour, during one of our family outings up to London. The butler had vacated the premises by the time that we returned home - although Daphne did get sent some letters, lamenting that he had never before been so disgracefully treated by members of the British aristocracy.

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