From “The Eye of the Wind”

An Autobiography by Peter Scott

The chapel at Oundle had only just been finished when I went there. Some years before, my mother had made a nude bronze figure of a boy with upraised arm as a War Memorial for West Downs. Another cast of this statue was bought for Oundle and placed on a rather lonely and exposed site in front of the chapel. As legend under it, it carried the answer of Isaiah, ‘Here am I, send me.’ The model for this statue had been an Italian boy, the son of Fiorini, the caster who for many years cast all my mother’s bronzes. I had never posed for it, and it was not at all like me, but it was useless to say so. It was (and I believe still is) widely held to be me. Only once have I ever been grateful for this assumption when I went back to the school to lecture after the war, and suggested that I had gone to the Admiralty at the beginning of the war with my right arm raised saying, ‘Here am I, send me.’ The lecture was a success!