After earliest recollections I should perhaps give a passport description of myself and let the items enlarge themselves. Date of birth.... Place of birth.... I have given those. Profession. In my passport I am down as ‘university professor.’ That was a convenience for 1926, when I first took it out. I thought of putting ‘writer,’ but people who are concerned with passports have complicated reactions to the word. ‘University professor’ wins a simple reaction—dull respect. No questions asked. So also with ‘army captain (pensioned list).’

My height is given as six feet two inches, my eyes as grey, and my hair as black. To ‘black’ should be added ‘thick and curly.’ I am described as having no special peculiarity. This is untrue. For a start, there is my big, once aquiline, now crooked nose. I broke it at Charterhouse playing Rugger with Soccer players. (I broke another player’s nose myself in the same game.) That unsteadied it, and boxing sent it askew. Finally, it was operated on. It is very crooked. It was once useful as a vertical line of demarcation between the left and right sides of my face, which are naturally unassorted—my eyes, eyebrows, and ears being all set noticeably crooked and my cheek-bones, which are rather high, being on different levels. My mouth is what is known as ‘full’ and my smile is crooked; when I was thirteen I broke two front teeth and became sensitive about showing them. My hands and feet are large. I weigh about twelve-stone four. My best comic turn is a double-jointed pelvis; I can sit on a table and rap like the Fox sisters with it. One shoulder is distinctly lower than the other, but that is because of a lung wound in the war. I do not carry a watch because I always magnetize the main-spring; during the war, when there was an army order that officers should carry watches and synchronize them daily, I had to buy two new ones every month. Medically, I am a thoroughly ‘good life.’

My passport gives my nationality as ‘British subject.’ Here I might parody Marcus Aurelius, who begins his Golden Book with the various ancestors and relations to whom he owes the virtues of a worthy Roman Emperor. Something of the sort about myself, and why I am not a Roman Emperor or even, except on occasions, an English gentleman. My mother’s father’s family, the von Ranke’s, was a family of Saxon country pastors, not anciently noble. Leopold von Ranke, the first modern historian, my great-uncle, brought the ‘von’ into the family. To him I owe my historical method. It was he who wrote, to the scandal of his contemporaries: ‘I am a historian before I am a Christian; my object is simply to find out how the things actually occurred,’ and of Michelet the French historian: ‘He wrote history in a style in which the truth could not be told.’ Thomas Carlyle decried him as ‘Dry-as-Dust’; to his credit. To Heinrich von Ranke, my grandfather, I owe my clumsy largeness, my endurance, energy, seriousness, and my thick hair. He was rebellious and even atheistic in his youth. As a medical student at a Prussian university he was involved in the political disturbances of 1848. He and a number of student friends demonstrated in favour of Karl Marx at the time of his trial for high treason. Like Marx, they had to leave the country. He came to London and finished his medical course there. In 1859 he went to the Crimea with the British forces as a regimental surgeon. All I know about this is a chance remark that he made to me as a child: ‘It is not always the big bodies that are the strongest. When I was at Sevastopol in the trenches I saw the great British Guards crack up and die by the score, while the little sappers took no harm.’ Still, his big body carried him very well.

He married, in London, my grandmother, a Schleswig-Dane. She was the daughter of Tiarks, the Greenwich astronomer. She was tiny, saintly, frightened. Before her father took to astronomy the Tiarks family had, it seems, followed the Danish country system, not at all a bad one, of alternate professions for father and son. The odd generations were tinsmiths and the even generations were pastors. My gentler characteristics trace back to my grandmother. She had ten children; the eldest of these was my mother, who was born in London. My grandfather’s atheism and radicalism sobered down. He eventually returned to Germany, where he became a well-known children’s doctor at Munich. He was about the first doctor in Europe to insist on clean milk for his child patients. When he found that he could not get clean milk to the hospitals by ordinary means he started a model dairy-farm himself. His agnosticism grieved my grandmother; she never ceased to pray for him, but concentrated more particularly on saving the next generation. She was a Lutheran. My grandfather did not die entirely unregenerate; his last words were: ‘The God of my fathers, to Him at least I hold.’ I do not know exactly what he meant by that, but it was a statement consistent with his angry patriarchal moods, with his acceptance of a prominent place in Bavarian society as Herr Geheimrat Ritter von Ranke, and with his loyalty to the Kaiser, with whom once or twice he went deer-shooting. It meant, practically, that he was a good Liberal in religion as in politics, and that my grandmother need not have worried. I prefer my German relations to my Irish relations; they have high principles, are easy, generous, and serious. The men have fought duels not for cheap personal honour, but in the public interest—called out, for example, because they have protested publicly against the scandalous behaviour of some superior officer or official. One of them who was in the German consular service lost seniority, just before the war, I was told, because he refused to use the consulate as a clearing-place for secret-service reports. They are not heavy drinkers either. My grandfather, as a student at the regular university ‘drunks,’ was in the habit of pouring his beer down into his eighteen-fortyish riding-boots. His children were brought up to speak English in their home, and always looked to England as the home of culture and progress. The women were noble and patient, and kept their eyes on the ground when they went out walking.

At the age of eighteen my mother was sent to England as companion to a lonely old woman who had befriended my grandmother when she was an orphan. For seventeen years she waited hand and foot on this old lady, who for the last few years was perfectly senile. When she finally died, my mother determined to go to India, after a short training as a medical missionary. This ambition was baulked by her meeting my father, a widower with five children; it was plain to her that she could do as good work on the home-mission field.

About the other side of my family. The Graves’ have a pedigree that dates back to the Conquest, but is good as far as the reign of Henry VII. Colonel Graves, the regicide, who was Ireton’s chief of horse, is claimed as the founder of the Irish branch of the family. Limerick was its centre. There were occasional soldiers and doctors in it, but they were collaterals; in the direct male line was a sequence of rectors, deans, and bishops. The Limerick Graves’ have no ‘hands’ or mechanical sense; instead they have a wide reputation as conversationalists. In those of my relatives who have the family characteristics most strongly marked, unnecessary talk is a nervous disorder. Not bad talk as talk goes; usually informative, often witty, but it goes on and on and on and on and on. The von Ranke’s have, I think, little mechanical aptitude either. It is most inconvenient to have been born into the age of the internal-combustion engine and the electric dynamo and to have no sympathy with them; a push bicycle, a primus stove, and an army rifle mark the bounds of my mechanical capacity.

My grandfather, on this side, was Protestant Bishop of Limerick. He had eight, or was it ten, children. He was a little man and a remarkable mathematician; he first formulated some theory or other of spherical conics. He was also an antiquary, and discovered the key to ancient Irish Ogham script. He was hard and, by reputation, far from generous. A gentleman and a scholar, and respected throughout the countryside on that account. He and the Catholic Bishop were on the very best terms. They cracked Latin jokes at each other, discussed fine points of scholarship, and were unclerical enough not to take their religious differences too seriously.

When I was in Limerick as a soldier of the garrison some twenty-five years after my grandfather’s death, I heard a lot about Bishop Graves from the townsfolk. The Catholic Bishop had once joked him about the size of his family, and my grandfather had retorted warmly with the text about the blessedness of the man who has his quiver full of arrows, to which the Catholic answered briefly and severely: ‘The ancient Jewish quiver only held six.’ My grandfather’s wake, they said, was the longest ever seen in the town of Limerick; it stretched from the cathedral right down O’Connell Street and over Sarsfield Bridge, and I do not know how many miles Irish beyond. He blessed me when I was a child, but I do not remember that.