In June 1926 my father, a master at the school in Hampshire in which I was an idle and unedifying pupil, received a letter from the Archaeology Officer of the Ordnance Survey in Southampton, asking for details of a new Romano-British site at West Harting, on the downs just across the county boundary in Sussex. Crawford was collecting material for the second edition of the 0s Roman Britain map: my proud discovery of sherds in moleheaps and rabbit-scrapes had found its way into the parish magazine and thence to the Portsmouth Evening News where it had been spotted by OGSC, and so the letter was really for me. Correspondence followed; the next year, in Southampton with my parents en route for a holiday in France, I was able to meet him for the first time. The Generation Gap had not then been invented, and we liked one another from the start, and from then on OGS (as we were all later to call him) took upon himself to be my archaeological godfather.
