An equally vivid experience, and one that nothing since has been able to eradicate, occurred […] when I was perhaps nine or ten years of age […] It was a hot summer Sunday, and my father and I went for a longish walk which took us out of the town through a wood known as Harlestone Firs. […] Before entering the wood we rested a little, leaning on a gate that gave us a distant view of the town.  Suddenly, through the hazy heat, I heard distant bells, the music of which seemed suspended in the still air.  I was held motionless, the scenery vanished, and I was aware only of downward-drifting sounds that seemed isolated from everything else around me.  I have no doubt now that this experience, held captive for so long in my inner consciousness, gradually became so embedded in my musical thinking as to be the means whereby the disembodied bell-sounds I heard that summer afternoon became transmuted into those downward scales that constantly act as focal points in my textures.