any--of much of that region altogether. I was only there two years,
and half my perambulations occurred at dusk or after dark. But with
Penge I associate my first realisations of the wonder and beauty of
twilight and night, the effect of dark walls reflecting lamplight, and
the mystery of blue haze-veiled hillsides of houses, the glare of shops
by night, the glowing steam and streaming sparks of railway trains and
railway signals lit up in the darkness. My first rambles in the evening
occurred at Penge--I was becoming a big and independent-spirited
boy--and I began my experience of smoking during these twilight prowls
with the threepenny packets of American cigarettes then just appearing
in the world.

My life centred upon the City Merchants School. Usually I caught the
eight-eighteen for Victoria, I had a midday meal and tea; four nights a
week I stayed for preparation, and often I was not back home again until
within an hour of my bedtime. I spent my half holidays at school
in order to play cricket and football. This, and a pretty voracious
appetite for miscellaneous reading which was fostered by the Penge
Middleton Library, did not leave me much leisure for local topography.
On Sundays also I sang in the choir at St. Martin's Church, and my
mother did not like me to walk out alone on the Sabbath afternoon, she
herself slumbered, so that I wrote or read at home. I must confess I was
at home as little as I could contrive.

Home, after my father's death, had become a very quiet and uneventful
place indeed. My mother had either an unimaginative temperament or her
mind was greatly occupied with private religious solicitudes, and I
remember her talking to me but little, and that usually upon topics
I was anxious to evade. I had developed my own view about low-Church
theology long before my father's death, and my meditation upon that
event had finished my secret estrangement from my mother's faith. My
reason would not permit even a remote chance of his being in hell, he
was so manifestly not evil, and this religion would not permit him a
remote chance of being out yet. When I was a little boy my mother had
taught me to read and write and pray and had done many things for me,
indeed she persisted in washing me and even in making my clothes until I
rebelled against these things as indignities. But our minds parted very
soon. She never began to understand the mental processes of my play,
she never interested herself in my sch