It was a special pleasure this week to see the excellent stage version of John Buchan’s The 39 Steps (reviewed in Weekend) in the centenary year of the novel’s publication and in the city that was home to the author.

The book was not, in fact, written at Buchan’s long-time residence at Elsfield Manor, but in Broadstairs where he was confined to bed recuperating from an illness.

As he told the novel’s dedicatee, Thomas Arthur Nelson, he ran out of thrillers to read “and was driven to write one for myself”.

It was not until 1919 that The Buchan family acquired Elsfield Manor where the writer lived from 1922 to 1935. He died in 1940 as Governor General of Canada and is buried in Elsfield churchyard beneath a circular gravestone designed by Sir Herbert Baker.

In 1979 I was given a memorable picture of life chez Buchan over tea with his eldest daughter, Alice, at the Randolph Hotel.

Lady Fairfax-Lucy as she was by then, chatelaine of Charlecote Park, near Stratford-upon-Avon, had just published her memoirs, entitled A Scrap Screen.

I was fascinated to learn of all the famous people who attended the Sunday “open house” at Elsfield during the years of her childhood. The salon rivalled that of Lady Ottoline Morrell at Garsington.

Guests included Quintin Hogg, Frank Pakenham, Bob Boothby, TE Lawrence and Robert Graves.

A Scrap Screen supplies a memorable picture of the regular visitor Virginia Woolf.

“I had the room next to her and knew she had not gone to sleep early but had stood for a long time at the window, sighing gustily, then moved about the room which was a large one, bumping into things like a moth in a lampshade, pulling off her rings, letting them fall with a tinkling crash on the glass-topped dressing table, all the while talking rather loudly to herself.”

Magic.