Kensington Round Pond

"As a child England had seemed much nearer than New York or the cowboy west. Partly, he supposed, it was because of the year in Kensington when he was very small : Kensington and the Round Pond and tea in the nursery and 'Here comes a chopper to chop your head'. And being taken out to the shires to visit country friends. That year had given England reality--perhaps that was why it lived in the books. And even as a boy he had wanted to go to Oxford. When in the end he had gone up, it had seemed both right and inevitable."

Sheldon Vanauken, A Severe Mercy, Prologue