An Ill-gotten Guinea Candidates seeking entry to the Clerical Classes
of the Civil Service are obliged to do, among other examination papers, one on English. I know this, because the last paper of this kind was based on a thousand-word extract from a book I wrote twenty years ago; the Civil Service Commission have sent me a copy of it, and a cheque for a guinea as well. Authors whose juvenilia have not yet been used to test the all-round ability of would-be bureaucrats may be curious to know how one reacts to this odd distinction. My own feelings are com- pounded of awe and guilt. " What," demand the Commis- sioners, " do you think the author means when he says . . ."; and there follows a sentence (perfectly grammatical, I am happy to say) which I must in a long-forgotten moment have written down on a piece of paper in a room which—though this of course is rather irrelevant—contained among other things the stuffed head of a rhinoceros, slain by one of my aunts. It is a solemn thought that young men's careers have been blighted by their inability to construe eight not particularly lapidary words which I happened to string together two decades ago, that some of those who had hoped to get into the Ministry of Food may soon, because of me, be on their way to join the Foreign Legion. . . . Thank goodness all the words except one are monosyllables.
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