In Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, Charles Ryder's cousin advises his young relation against taking rooms in the quad of his college. My rooms in my second year in Corpus Christi College were in the Pelican Quad, within a few paces of the hall, chapel and junior common room but, unlike Ryder's cousin, I never felt either besieged or misused by other undergraduates always popping in and out of my rooms, depositing their gowns after chapel and otherwise disturbing my peace. Friends did after dinner in hall occasionally drop in for coffee as I did on others in this small college where lifelong friendships could easily be formed. Over the years half a dozen of my college friends were to turn up in Freetown, some with their wives, mainly as a result of our meeting at Corpus. Time was to reveal to me and evidently to them, how we had influenced each other. Conversation started in hall hardened into more serious discussions making deeply etched impressions. One of my friends, Frank Oakley, later President of Williams College, Massachusetts, presenting me half a century after our first meeting for an honorary degree, wrote, ‘As an undergraduate at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, during the twilight years of European rule in Africa, you nudged your fellow students out of their metropolitan provincialism by a winning combination of patience, and the gift of lasting friendship’.