Miles Fitzalan-Howard was one of eight children of a fairly distant cousin of the previous two Dukes of Norfolk, and so grew up in the give and take of life in a large family. Up until the age of about 30, he had no great expectation that he would succeed his predecessor, who was married, with four daughters, and might well have produced a son and heir. He had been a rather average schoolboy at Ampleforth, excelling neither at work nor games, but ‘always cheerful and keen’. He made life-long friends there, including several of the monks. Likewise, when he went on to Oxford, he claimed with typical openness and self-deprecation that he had worked hard, ‘but not all that hard’; certainly not as hard as he did later on in the army, both in war and peace, and later still as a significant champion of Catholic principles. It was unquestionably through the army that he developed from a good-humoured but not outstanding young man into a vigorous, brave and efficient officer, eventually to reach the rank of major-general, and later still becoming the leading Catholic layman in England. A bluff, breezy military manner became natural to him and in later years sometimes seemed to approach self-caricature.
But it was always marked with humour and kindliness. He had become a close friend of an uncle of mine at school and university, and after successfully returning with the Grenadiers after Dunkirk he trained with them, as adjutant of his battalion, near my uncle’s family home. One hot day, I can remember him going for a swim in the pool not far from the house. While in the water, he spotted a mischievous village boy running off with his trousers.
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