Diary of a Drug Fiend

4 The Diary of a Drug Fiend I had gone into the air service; did pretty well, though somehow I was never sure either of myself or of my machine. My squadron commander used to tell me that I should never make a great airman. “Qld thing,” he said, “ you lack the instinct,” qualifying the noun with an entirely meaningless adjective which somehow succeeded in making his sentence highly illuminating. “Where you get away with it,” he said, “is that you have an analytic brain.” Well, I suppose I have. That’s how I come to be writing this up. Anyhow, at the end of the war I found myself with a knighthood which I still firmly believe to have been due to a clerical error on the part of some official. As for Uncle Mortimer, he lived on in his crustacean way; a sulky, rich, morose, old bachelor. We never heard a word of him. And then, about a year ago, he died; and I found to my amazement that I was sole heir to his five or six thousand a year, and the owner of Barley Grange; which is really an awfully nice place in Kent, quite near enough to be convenient for the prosperous young man about town which I had become; and for the best of it, a piece of artificial water quite large enough for me to use for a waterdrome for my seaplane. I may not have the instinct for flying, as Cartwright said; but it’s the only sport I care about. Golf? When one has flown over a golf course, those people do look such appalling rotters | Such pigmy solemnities! Now about my feeling depressed. When the end of the war came, when I found myself penniless, out of a job, utterly spoilt by the war (even if I had had the money) for going on with my hospital, I had developed an entirely new psychology. You know how it feels when you are fighting duels in the air, you seem to be detached from everything. There is nothing in the