A Ball of Fire
" No Marstock, he " would, if only the American people were as well acquainted as they ought to be with Sir Harold Nicolson's Some People, make a good caption for Time Magazine to put under a photograph of Sir Harold Caccia, this week promoted at the age of 47 from our Embassy in Vienna to the post of Deputy Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office. The difficulty which the J. D. Marstocks of this world find in living up to, or indeed in surviving at all, spectacularly success- ful careers at their public schools has never worried Sir Harold. A brilliant player of both the Field and the Wall games, a demoniac if not a demon bowler and a difficult person to beat whatever he was at, he swept the board at Eton, where he finished up as President of Pop; at Oxford he was one of the first of the few Etonian Rugger Blues. Despite a lifelong ten- dency to giggle at solemn or ceremonial moments—a weakness which, during family prayers in a Scottish shooting lodge where we were both staying years ago, bid fair to bring on a form of suppressed apoplexy—Sir Harold has always seemed to me to have greater reserves of purpose and tenacity than most of his contemporaries. I have never known him much perturbed by anything, whether it was the iron mouth of a China pony during a paper-chase among the Ming tombs or the total destruction by the Luftwaffe of the vessel in which he, • his family and an assorted company were trying to reach Crete from Greece in 1941. I can think of nobody else who would bring the qualities that he will to his new post.
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