Olive Graham

A Young Friend who could make himself acceptable both in the oppressively evangelical atmosphere of the 1916 Yearly Meeting in Dublin, and in the home of an ardent Irish republican; someone who was evidently much in demand as a secretary to organisations working under pressure, and on whom a military officer could cast covetous eyes as a valuable recruit to the War Office – someone, moreover, who impressed at least one Cambridge colleague as a kind of archetypal embodiment of pure reason – what could he have been like? In some ways he was distinctly insecure and lacking in confidence. In the letter to Rachel Graham, already referred to in the first chapter in connection with his schooldays, he suggests that although he often felt solitary and unregarded, and suspects that Rachel may too, this feeling can be ‘a proof of unusual, rather exceptional gifts, which are not properly understood by the normal, average being’. He hasn't yet found his vocation: