This memoir is of the childhood of Robert Bruce Lockhart in Victorian and Edwardian Scotland. From his birth in Anstruther in 1887 to his experiences as a public schoolboy in Edinburgh at the turn of the century, this account presents a portrait of a young boy before World War I. Lockhart's recollections are also a candid insight into the background of a man who went on to a career of great distinction in the Foreign Office, wrote a best-selling account of his adventures in Bolshevik Russia at the end of World War I, and became Director General of Political Warfare during World War II. Lockhart is the author of Memoirs of a British Agent and Retreat from Glory.