of 22, Scott was posted as a commissioned officer in India, and he sailed on the Athlone Castle from Liverpool that year. He quickly came down with amoebic dysentery, not diagnosed until 1964. The disease may have had some effect on his character and writing. He joined the Indian Army Service Corps and became familiar with life at hill stations such as Abbottabad and Murree. He made many close friendships with Indian comrades, and literary portraits of his friends appear in his works from this point. He later helped to organise the logistic support for the Fourteenth Army's reconquest of Burma. After the fall of Rangoon in 1945 he spent time in Calcutta and Kashmir, later posted to Malaya to rout the Japanese occupation; they had, however, already surrendered by the time Scott arrived. In his time away from India he missed the country deeply and longed to return. At the end of the year he rejoined his company at Bihar and sailed back to England, having spent three years in India; times of great tension and conflict for the country. During his time of service, he continued to write poetry. Career In 1941, before his military posting, Scott had published a collection of three religious poems entitled I, Gerontius, as part of the Resuram Series of pamphlets. He wrote for Country Life and The Times. His work was included in Poetry Quarterly and the poetry anthology Poems of this War (1942). In 1948 he published Pillars of Salt in a collection of Four Jewish Plays. After demobilisation in 1946, Scott was employed in the two small publishing houses, Falcon Press and Grey Walls Press, headed by the Conservative MP Peter Baker. In 1950 Scott joined Pearn, Pollinger & Higham as a literary agent (later to split into Pollinger Limited and David Higham Associates) and subsequently became a director. He was described as caring and dedicated in his work: "a prince among agents". Whilst there, authors he covered included Arthur C. Clark, Morris West, M. M. Kaye, Elizabeth David, Mervyn Peake and Muriel Spark. One biographer notes that as an agent, Scott "sheltered nervous talents, supported frail ones, pruned back bogus growth, detected and cherished genuine achievement in the wildest and most undisciplined bolters." Scott's first novel, Johnny Sahib, met with 17 rejections from publishers, was eventually released in 1952, coming to win the Eyre & Spottiswoode Literary Fellowship Prize.