years with them, but had at
last been recognised at a fair in Norfolk, and brought home to his family
by an uncle. It was not to be expected that Borrow would conceal from
the public "several years" of this kind. Nevertheless, in none of his
books has he so much as hinted at a period of adoption with Gypsies when
he was a boy. Nor has that massive sleuth-hound, Dr. Knapp, discovered
any traces of such an adoption. If there is any foundation for the story
except Borrow's wish to please the secretary, it is the escapade of his
fourteenth or fifteenth year--when he and three other boys from Norwich
Grammar School played truant, intending to make caves to dwell in among
the sandhills twenty miles away on the coast, but were recognised on the
road, deceitfully detained by a benevolent gentleman and within a few
days brought back, Borrow himself being horsed on the back of James
Martineau, according to the picturesque legend, for such a thrashing that
he had to lie in bed a fortnight and must bear the marks of it while he
was flesh and blood. Borrow celebrated this escapade by a ballad in
dialogue called "The Wandering Children and the Benevolent Gentleman. An
Idyll of the Roads." {13a} There may have been another escapade of the
same kind, for Dr Knapp {13b} prints an account of how Borrow, at the age
of fifteen, and two schoolfellows lived for three days in a cave at Acle
when they ought to have been at school. But his companions were the same
in both stories, and "three days in a cave" is a very modest increase for
such a story in half-a-century. It was only fifteen years later that
Borrow took revenge upon the truth and told the story of his exile with
the Gypsies.

{picture: The Grammar School Norwich. Photo: Jarrold & Sons, Norwich:
page12.jpg}

Probably every man has more or less clearly and more or less constantly
before his mind's eye an ideal self which the real seldom more than
approaches. This ideal self may be morally or in other ways inferior,
but it remains the standard by which the man judges his acts. Some men
prove the existence of this ideal self by announcing now and then that
they are misunderstood. Or they do things which they afterwards condemn
as irrelevant or uncharacteristic and out of harmony. Borrow had an
ideal self very clearly before him when he was writing, and it is
probable that in writing he often described not what he was but what in a
better, larger, freer, more Borrovian wo