24 NOVEMBER 1939, Page 15

It was a Frenchman who first released my soul from

this feeling of perpetual inferiority. Of the many debts which I owe to France it is this debt which warms me with the deepest gratitude. He was a professor at a small university, and I lived in his house. I had at that date decided that, although condemned perpetually to be bad at games, I could at least be good at exercise. The relation between these two forms of physical expression was that between cleanli- ness and godliness. I had abandoned all hope of ever becoming godly, but I could be clean. And thus while staying with my professor I spent many hours " keeping fit," one of the main methods in this process being to bicycle great distances in the rain.

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