FOOTNOTES
[1] The Jonkheer Alexander Louis Teixeira de Mattos san Paio y Mendes. The family was Jewish in origin and was driven from Portugal by the persecution of the Holy Office. Teixeira was naturalized a British subject in the middle of the war and gave up his Dutch title. Even before this, he had contracted his full style to Alexander Teixeira de Mattos on ceremonial occasions, to A. Teixeira in departmental correspondence and to Tex or T. in letters to his friends.
[2] I quote from Chapter VII of While I Remember, where the genesis of the department is described, though only from hearsay.
[3] Even in Teixeira’s wide reading there were occasional gaps; and, until I brought it to his notice, he was unacquainted with the celebrated life of Sir Christopher Wren by Mr. E. Clerihew and Mr. G. K. Chesterton:
‘Sir Christopher Wren
Said, “I am going to dine with some men.
If anybody calls
Say I am designing St. Paul’s.”’
After reading it, Teixeira’s nightly valediction as he left for his bridge club was: “I think ... yes, I think I shall design St. Paul’s for an hour or two.”
[4] From the notice of his death in The Times.
[5] Future letters were dated from ‘Hellgate’.
[6] The Burgomaster of Stillemonde.
[7] Frank MacKinnon K.C.
[8] A short time before, Teixeira, who affected a loathing for music, had been invited to hear the same quartette. Abandoning his usual gentleness of speech and spirit, he had accepted on condition of being allowed to massacre the quartette.
[9] Hymn to Aphrodite.
[10] Eimar O’Duffy’s Wasted Island.
[11] Incidentally, my father lived 85 years, during all of which he never spoke of his particular regiment, brigade, division or army corps as anything but the Coldcream Guards; not in jest but in sheer, manly, gentlemanly ignorance.
[12] Perfectly good seventeenth-century English.
[13] Even the French write, invariably, un coup d’Etat, le conseil d’Etat, but l’état des coups, l’état du conseil.
[14] The Concise Oxford Dictionary.
[15] The reference here is to a story illustrative of the tricks which a man’s memory sometimes plays him:
Reading in the Morning Post, that Mr. John Brown, of 500 Clarges Street, is shortly leaving for Uganda on a big-game-shooting expedition and would like a gentleman to come with him, sharing expenses, thought no more of the advertisement and went about his day’s work. That night he dined intemperately. On being ejected from his club, he was bound for home when he recalled the forgotten advertisement and decided that something must be done about it.
Driving to 500 Clarges Street, he demanded to see Mr. John Brown.
“Are you Mr. John Brown?” he enquired of a sleepy and illhumoured figure in pyjamas.
“I am, sir,” answered John Brown.
“You’re the Mr. John Brown going shooting Uganda?”
“Yes.”
“You want shome one come with you?”
“Yes.”...
“Share ’spenshes?”
“Yes.”
“You put that ’vertisshment in Morning Posht?”
“Yes.”
“I thought sho. Shorry knock you up. Felt I musht tell you.... that I’m not coming.”...
[16] They would have gone quite mad over the Russian Ballet.
[17] The story in question was of a member of the Cave-Brown-Cave family, who, after conversing with a stranger in a railway-carriage, was asked his name.
“Cave-Brown-Cave,” he replied. “And may I ask yours?”
“Home-Sweet-Home,” answered his infuriated interlocutor.
[18] In Chancery.
[19] In preparation for visiting South America I had been vaccinated.
[20] Ultimately this was published with the title: The Law Inevitable.