The beginning of 1911 found him at the Clergy School.  But what he wanted he did not find there.  During his Oxford vacations he had made many expeditions to poorer London, at first to Notting Dale where was the Rugby School Mission, and afterwards to Bermondsey.  But these expeditions had not been entirely satisfactory.  He had then gone as a “visitor.”  The lessons he wanted to learn now from “the People” could only be learned by becoming as far as possible one of them.  The story of his struggles to do so in his life in Bermondsey, and of his journey to Australia in the steerage of a German liner and of his roughing it there, always with the same object in view, cannot be told here.  The first outcome of it all was the writing of his book, The Lord of All Good Life.  Of this book he says, in a letter to his friend Tom Allen of the Oxford and Bermondsey Mission: 

“The book I regard as my child.  I feel quite absurdly about it; to me it is the sudden vision of what lots of obscure things really meant.  It is coming out of dark shadows into—­moonlight ...  I would have you to realize that it was written spontaneously in a burst, in six weeks, without any consultation of authorities or any revision to speak of.  I had tried and tried, but without success.  Then suddenly everything cleared up.  To myself, the writing of it was an illumination.  I did not write it laboriously and with calculation or because I wanted to write a book and be an author.  I wrote it because problems that had been troubling me suddenly cleared up and because writing down the result was to me the natural way of getting everything straight in my own mind.”

The book was written not away in the peace of the country, nor in the comparative quiet of a certain sunny little sitting-room I know of, looking on to a leafy back garden in Kensington, where Donald often sat and smoked and wrote, but in a little flat in a dull tenement house in a grey street in Bermondsey, where I remember visiting him with a cousin of his.

Here the Student lived like a lord—­for Bermondsey!  For he possessed two flats, one for his “butler”—­a sick-looking young man in list slippers, and his wife and family—­and the other for himself.

The little sitting-room in which he entertained us was very pleasant, with light walls, a bright table-cloth, a gleam of something brass that had come from Ceylon, one or two gaily painted dancing shields from Africa, and two barbaric looking dolls, about a foot high, dressed chiefly in beads and paint, that he had picked up in an Antananarivo shop in Madagascar.  They came in usefully when he was lecturing on Missions!

His bedroom he did not want us to see.  It struck cold and appeared to be reeking with damp!

The weather had been rather dull when we arrived, but suddenly there was a glint of sunshine, and a grind-organ that had wandered up the street started playing just opposite.  Two couple of children began to dance.  A girl with a jug stopped to watch them, and mothers with babies came to their doors.  A window was thrown open opposite and a whole family of children leaned out to see the fun.