Eventually Arthur could stand it no longer and decided to leave home. He packed his entire collection of picture postcards of Brighton into his pathetically small suitcase. In fact, the suitcase was far too large for the three postcards in his collection, and he would have done better taking some socks and clean underwear.

Arthur and Wol the dog

But perhaps it was all for the best. Who can tell? If he'd been run over by a bus it might have been a different story. Well, it would have been a different story, because he would not have met up with Crispin again. Anyway Arthur never forgot his mother, although he did forget her name and her address, and consequently was never able to visit her.

On his travels (regrettably nowhere mentioned in Wilfred Thesiger's Sands of Arabia), Arthur, his skin constantly troubling him, fell in with a group of travelling entertainers called the Jelly Babies. It was here that his great love affair with ventriloquism began, and where he first encountered Wol the dog.

Victoria Station

Wol had begun his career on the maiden voyage of the Titanic, and was saved when an angry steward threw him overboard before the ship left Southampton. Wol had disgraced himself with a poodle called Victoria, who regrettably perished when the ship went to its watery grave. (Not mentioned anywhere in the latest moving picture facsimile of the tragedy, incidentally).

It was at the Theatre Royal Congleton that Arthur looked down into the stalls as he was performing the paso doble on stilts and saw Crispin, now the drama critic of the Darlington Bugle staring up at him in astonishment. From that moment on, they were inseparable, and for some months Crispin took to going everywhere on stilts in imitation of his childhood hero and friend. But the clouds were beginning to darken over Europe. Many years later, Arthur summed up those days magnificently.