serted by
inadvertency to fill up space. The only literary contribution in the
first number was a column by Topham in faultless stereotyped English in
depreciation of some fancied evil called Utilitarian Studies and ending
with that noble old quotation:--

"To the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome."

And Flack crowded us out of number two with a bright little paper on the
"Humours of Cricket," and the Head himself was profusely thoughtful all
over the editorial under the heading of "The School Chapel; and How it
Seems to an Old Boy."

Britten and I found it difficult to express to each other with any grace
or precision what we felt about that magazine.

CHAPTER THE FOURTH ~~ ADOLESCENCE

1

I find it very difficult to trace how form was added to form
and interpretation followed interpretation in my ever-spreading,
ever-deepening, ever-multiplying and enriching vision of this world into
which I had been born. Every day added its impressions, its hints, its
subtle explications to the growing understanding. Day after day the
living interlacing threads of a mind weave together. Every morning now
for three weeks and more (for to-day is Thursday and I started on a
Tuesday) I have been trying to convey some idea of the factors and
early influences by which my particular scrap of subjective tapestry
was shaped, to show the child playing on the nursery floor, the son
perplexed by his mother, gazing aghast at his dead father, exploring
interminable suburbs, touched by first intimations of the sexual
mystery, coming in with a sort of confused avidity towards the centres
of the life of London. It is only by such an effort to write it down
that one realises how marvellously crowded, how marvellously analytical
and synthetic those ears must be. One begins with the little child
to whom the sky is a roof of blue, the world a screen of opaque and
disconnected facts, the home a thing eternal, and "being good" just
simple obedience to unquestioned authority; and one comes at last to
the vast world of one's adult perception, pierced deep by flaring
searchlights of partial understanding, here masked by mists, here
refracted and distorted through half translucent veils, here showing
broad prospects and limitless vistas and here impenetrably dark.

I recall phases of deep speculation, doubts and even prayers by night,
and strange occasions when by a sort of hypnotic contemplation of
nothingness I sought t