Arthur James McCall Alport died of meningitis in June 1911, only a month after his second birthday. His death was a particularly savage blow to his father, a doctor based in Turffontein, near Johannesburg. Neither his own skill, nor that of a specialist who was called in from town to assist, could save his only child. At the funeral he allowed no one else to touch the tiny coffin.

When describing the incident in an otherwise light-hearted memoir many years later, the father, Dr Cecil Alport, pretended that the bereaved doctor was not himself but a fictitious character named “Dr Curious”. “Curious” is suddenly introduced to the reader late in the book as a fellow-student of the author, who married someone from the same town as Alport's wife and emigrated to “a suburb of Johannesburg just about the time that I did”. The parallels between the two characters extend to their dreams, notably their shared desire to secure a large fortune through speculation in mining and the Stock Exchange or gambling at the local race-track.

If Cecil Alport had really wanted his readers to think that he and “Curious” were different people, it would have been advisable to think up an alternative title to The House of Curious for a book about himself and his family. At first readers might be puzzled about the identity of “Curious”, then baffled as to why the author should adopt this disguise at all if he was going to make it so transparent.