It must have been in the summer of 1938 that I first met David Lindsay, and by no stretch of the imagination could our initial encounter have been attributed to literature in any way.

Aged sixty-two at the time, Lindsay could only contemplate a writing career that was sadly in the doldrums, as it was to remain, indeed, until his death, seven years later, whilst I was just twenty years of age, with my own literary status completely non-existent.

The truth, as it usually is, was much more prosaic. In fact, at this period, I had not read a single line of any of the five books by Lindsay then published, and I came to know the author of A Voyage to Arcturus solely through moving in the same circle of friends as his two daughters: Diana, then aged nineteen, and Helen, who was two years younger. Indeed, even this bland admission needs some peripheral qualification, because, if my memory, forty years on, is to be relied upon, I am inclined to think that I was first invited to the Lindsay household by a girl called Jacqueline, not to be confused with Lindsay's wife, more than twenty years his junior, who bore the same name.