. I had
found a small, green-covered book given to my father by a Dublin man of
science; it gave an account of the strange sea creatures the man of
science had discovered among the rocks at Howth or dredged out of Dublin
Bay. It had long been my favourite book; and when I read it I believed
that I was growing very wise, but now I should have no time for it nor for
my own thoughts. Every moment would be taken up learning or saying lessons
or walking between school and home four times a day, for I came home in
the middle of the day for dinner. But presently I forgot my trouble,
absorbed in two things I had never known, companionship and enmity. After
my first day's lesson, a circle of boys had got around me in a playing
field and asked me questions, "who's your father?" "what does he do?" "how
much money has he?" Presently a boy said something insulting. I had never
struck anybody or been struck, and now all in a minute, without any
intention upon my side, but as if I had been a doll moved by a string, I
was hitting at the boys within reach and being hit. After that I was
called names for being Irish, and had many fights and never, for years,
got the better of any one of them; for I was delicate and had no muscles.
Sometimes, however, I found means of retaliation, even of aggression.
There was a boy with a big stride, much feared by little boys, and finding
him alone in the playing field, I went up to him and said, "rise upon
Sugaun and sink upon Gad." "What does that mean?" he said. "Rise upon
hay-leg and sink upon straw," I answered and told him that in Ireland the
sergeant tied straw and hay to the ankles of a stupid recruit to show him
the difference between his legs. My ears were boxed, and when I complained
to my friends, they said I had brought it upon myself; and that I deserved
all I got. I probably dared myself to other feats of a like sort, for I
did not think English people intelligent or well-behaved unless they were
artists. Everyone I knew well in Sligo despised Nationalists and
Catholics, but all disliked England with a prejudice that had come down
perhaps from the days of the Irish Parliament. I knew stories to the
discredit of England, and took them all seriously. My mother had met some
English woman who did not like Dublin because the legs of the men were too
straight, and at Sligo, as everybody knew, an Englishman had once said to
a car-driver, "if you people were not so lazy, you would pull down the
mou