for hall". Day by day, hour by hour, I pictured
myself back at school.

I was in a nostalgic mood, but I was also in a rebellious mood.
Intensely though I had enjoyed my four years at Sherborne, I had been in
constant conflict with authority. That conflict, so it seemed to me, had
been in the main caused and determined by authority's inability or
refusal to recognise the true nature of school life. The Public School
system was venerated as a pillar of the British Empire and out of that
veneration had grown a myth of the ideal Public School boy--Kipling's
Brushwood Boy. In no sense had I incarnated such a myth and it had been
responsible, I felt, for half my troubles. I wanted to expose it. Those
moods of nostalgia and rebellion fused finally in an imperious need to
relive my school days on paper, to put it all down, term by term,
exactly as it had been, to explain, interpret, justify my point of view.

I wrote the book in six and a half weeks, getting up at half past four
every morning and returning to my manuscript at night after the day's
parades. I posted it, section by section, to my father who corrected the
spelling and punctuation, interjected an occasional phrase and sent it
to be typed. I never revised it. As the manuscript shows, it was printed
as it was written, paragraph by paragraph.

The book after two or three refusals was accepted by Grant Richards and
published in July 1917 in the same week that I was posted as a
machine-gun second-lieutenant to the B.E.F. in France. It could not have
come out under luckier auspices. It had an immediate news value. There
was a boom in soldier poets. Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert
Nichols, W.J. Turner had recently made their debuts. Here was a soldier
novelist, the first and in his teens. As always in war-time there was a
demand for books and there was that summer a dearth of novels. A spirit
of challenge and criticism was in the air. The war after three years was
still "bogged down" and public opinion attributed allied failings in the
field to mismanagement in high places. The rebelliousness of _The Loom
of Youth_ was in tune with the temper of the hour. Finally I had the
immense advantage of being the son of Arthur Waugh. My father as a
critic and a publisher was one of the most loved and respected figures
in the world of letters. Many were anxious to give his son a chance.

The book had a flattering reception. Nothing of any particular interest
was being p