As I walk a little unsteadily about the house I have lived in for sixty years, I often fall into musing about the different turns life might have taken.
What if, for example, someone had not dropped in on me and my three-year-old son and left a copy of the New Statesman on the table? Leafing through it I came on an ad in the personal column reading: American professor seeks room in genial household . . . .
And what if, some years before that, I had said Yes. I could have spent a sheltered life at the side of an Oxford don.
But you can’t have it all ways and so much is a matter of luck. For instance, what luck that we had just bought our first viable car when told of a cottage to rent on a North Yorkshire sheep farm. The car’s very first outing got us there in time, and it was eighteen years before the drive to that enchanted place became too much: not for the car but for us.
And if, in our travelling years, it hadn’t been that particular taxi which took us to the Valley of the Kings, I would never have been led through that biblical landscape sitting on a donkey. This is what happened after I had admired the view from the rooftop of the taxi driver’s house, and it is is one of the happiest memories of all our travelling days.
Other What Ifs were more consequential: what if the outgoing editor at André Deutsch Limited — an Oxford friend — had not talked her employer into taking me on as her replacement? I was to stay there for thirty years.
And more momentous still: what if in October 1939 my Estonian grandmother had prevailed upon my father to leave us behind in the then safety of Tallinn . . . Only my brother and I (of the eight children seen here at my previous birthday party) were to be alive two years later.
