"I liked living in the country, though I suppose my attitude to it was pretty much the same as my attitude to living in Finland
some fifty years later - it is all right if you can get away from it often enough. Every Saturday I took the money that I earned
from my newspaper round (I delivered the evening papers for my father for five shillings a week - the others had ten
shillings) and went the nine miles to Leicester to browse through the junk shops and second-hand bookshops. Rarely did I
ever come back without a book. I was not a discriminating collector and I just bought anything printed in the seventeen
century, which was within my budget. At that time, since I was not fussy about the titles, I found many good-looking books
for about one shilling each. My best purchase, which I treasured for many years afterwards, was eighteen volumes of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica printed in about 1910. I spent most of my time, when I was not shooting rats or depriving birds of
their eggs, with my head stuck between those pages."
