“I was born…in a public-house in the East End, and,
however lacking a public-house may be in refinement and the true culture, it
certainly provides plenty of excitement. Before I was six weeks old I had upset
three policemen by getting between their legs when they came round to the
side-door, thinking they had heard suspicious noises; and I can still recall
the interesting sensation of being chased seventeen times round the yard with a
broom-handle after a well-planned and completely successful raid on the larder.
These and other happenings of a like nature soothed for the moment but could
not cure the restlessness which has always been so marked a trait in my
character. I have always been restless, unable to settle down in one place and
anxious to get on to the next thing. This may be due to a gipsy strain in my
ancestry--one of my uncles travelled with a circus—or it may be the Artistic
Temperament, acquired from a grandfather who, before dying of a surfeit of
paste in the property-room of the Bristol Coliseum, which he was visiting in
the course of a professional tour, had an established reputation on the
music-hall stage as one of Professor Pond's Performing Poodles.”—
English
humorist and lyricist P. G. Wodehouse (1881-1975), “The Mixer,”
in The Man With Two Left Feet and Other Stories (1917)
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