I believed at the time that it was sheer snobbery, but it wasn’t as simple as that. Certainly he didn’t think me good enough, but not only, or even mainly, on a class distinction level; and probably we would never have understood each other, or come eventually to like each other, had it not been for a wet afternoon and a game of chess.

Jenny and I went to Aynsford for one of our rare, painful Sunday visits. We ate our roast beef in near silence, Jenny’s father staring rudely out of the window and drumming his fingers on the table. I made up my mind that we wouldn’t go again. I’d had enough. Jenny could visit him alone.

After lunch she said she wanted to sort out some of her books now that we had a new book-case, and disappeared upstairs. Charles Roland and I looked at each other in dislike, the afternoon stretching drearily ahead and the downpour outside barring retreat into the garden and park beyond.

‘Do you play chess?’ he asked in a bored, expecting-the-answer-no voice.

‘I know the moves,’ I said.

He shrugged (it was more like a squirm), but clearly thinking that it would be less trouble than making conversation, he brought a chess set out and gestured to me to sit opposite him. He was normally a good player, but that afternoon he was bored and irritated and inattentive, and I beat him quite early in the game. He couldn’t believe it. He sat staring at the board, fingering the bishop with which I’d got him in a classic discovered check.

‘Where did you learn?’ he said eventually, still looking down.

‘Out of a book.’

‘Have you played a great deal?’

‘No, not much. Here and there.’ But I’d played with some good players.