;
Britten went to Oxford, and our circumstances never afterwards threw us
continuously together until the days of the BLUE WEEKLY.

As boys, we walked together, read and discussed the same books, pursued
the same enquiries. We got a reputation as inseparables and the nickname
of the Rose and the Lily, for Britten was short and thick-set with
dark close curling hair and a ruddy Irish type of face; I was lean and
fair-haired and some inches taller than he. Our talk ranged widely and
yet had certain very definite limitations. We were amazingly free with
politics and religion, we went to that little meeting-house of William
Morris's at Hammersmith and worked out the principles of Socialism
pretty thoroughly, and we got up the Darwinian theory with the help
of Britten's medical-student brother and the galleries of the Natural
History Museum in Cromwell Road. Those wonderful cases on the ground
floor illustrating mimicry, dimorphism and so forth, were new in our
times, and we went through them with earnest industry and tried over our
Darwinism in the light of that. Such topics we did exhaustively. But on
the other hand I do not remember any discussion whatever of human sex or
sexual relationships. There, in spite of intense secret curiosities, our
lips were sealed by a peculiar shyness. And I do not believe we ever had
occasion either of us to use the word "love." It was not only that we
were instinctively shy of the subject, but that we were mightily ashamed
of the extent of our ignorance and uncertainty in these matters. We
evaded them elaborately with an assumption of exhaustive knowledge.

We certainly had no shyness about theology. We marked the emancipation
of our spirits from the frightful teachings that had oppressed our
boyhood, by much indulgence in blasphemous wit. We had a secret
literature of irreverent rhymes, and a secret art of theological
caricature. Britten's father had delighted his family by reading aloud
from Dr. Richard Garnett's TWILIGHT OF THE GODS, and Britten conveyed
the precious volume to me. That and the BAB BALLADS were the inspiration
of some of our earliest lucubrations.

For an imaginative boy the first experience of writing is like a tiger's
first taste of blood, and our literary flowerings led very directly to
the revival of the school magazine, which had been comatose for some
years. But there we came upon a disappointment.

8

In that revival we associated certain other of the Sixth