SOME TIME TOWARDS the end of the war I called at the Ministry of Information to return to John Pilcher the copy of The Tale of Genji he had lent me. For several months I had been working very hard at Japanese, the Japanese of that peculiar wartime variety which those of my generation remember so well. We had to translate examples of decyphered messages from merchant ships, announcing their position, speed and cargo, or old newspaper articles laboriously put into Roman script by our teachers in order that we should thereby become more accustomed to dealing with the decyphered messages. Hie vocabulary of our first lessons included the words for submarines, radar, land mines, and obscure parts of machines like transmitter-oscillators. The Tale of Genji had been a blessed oasis in the midst of this barren waste, promising rewards to come from the language in happier times.

But it was not long since I had left a girls’ boarding school, and for most of the time I was still paralyzed with shyness. To talk to new people, especially men, was a severe ordeal. So when John Pilcher said, ‘You must come and meet Arthur Waley. He works just down the corridor’, my instant reaction was one of alarm. But my protests were ignored, and a moment later I was in a small room where, behind a desk piled high with Chinese newspapers, sat the illustrious scholar. Thinking desperately that I must say something which he would at least agree with, I ventured on the remark, ‘I often find Japanese dreadfully ambiguous’. ‘Oh really, he replied in a high, level tone. ‘I have never come across a single case of ambiguity in my whole life.’

It was not for months afterwards that I realized that he had intended by this remark not the devastating snub I had understood. He had meant me to hear a friendly, encouraging overture to an academic discussion. How interesting. That has not been my experience, certainly, but I should be delighted to hear of yours…. At the time, however, this interview with him seemed likely to be my last. So utterly improbable did it seem that he should wish a second encounter that I was dumbfounded when, several months later, I received the friendliest of invitations to call and see his books.