On the first day, Lily, my nurse, took me to school. We went hand-in-hand through the churchyard, down the Town Hall steps, and along the south side of the High Street. The school was at the bottom of an alley; two rooms, one downstairs and one upstairs, a staircase, a place for hanging coats, and a lavatory. ‘Miss’ kept the school — handsome, good-tempered Miss, whom I liked so much. Miss used the lower room for prayers and singing and drill and meetings, and the upper one for all the rest. Lily hung my coat up, took me upstairs and deposited me among a score or so of children who ranged in age from five to eleven. The boys were neatly dressed, and the girls over-dressed if anything. Miss taught in the old-fashioned way, catering for all ages at once.

I was difficult.

No one had suggested, before this time, that anything mattered outside myself. I was used to being adored, for I was an attractive child in an Anglo-Saxon sort of way. Indeed, my mother, in her rare moments of lyricism, would declare that I had ‘eyes like cornflowers and hair like a field of ripe corn’. I had known no one outside my own family — nothing but walks with Lily or my parents, and long holidays by a Cornish sea. I had read much for my age but saw no point in figures. I had a passion for words in themselves, and collected them like stamps or birds’ eggs. I had also a clear picture of what school was to bring me. It was to bring me fights. I lacked opposition, and yearned to be victorious. Achilles, Lancelot and Aeneas should have given me a sense of human nobility but they gave me instead a desire to be a successful bruiser.

It did not occur to me that school might have discipline or that numbers might be necessary. While, therefore, I was supposed to be writing out my tables, or even dividing four oranges between two poor boys, I was more likely to be scrawling a list of words, butt (barrel), butter, butt (see goat). While I was supposed to be learning my Collect, I was likely to be chanting inside my head a list of delightful words which I had picked up God knows where — deebriss and Skirmishar, creskant and sweeside. On this first day, when Miss taxed me with my apparent inactivity, I smiled and said nothing, but nothing, until she went away.

At the end of the week she came to see my mother. I stuck my field of ripe corn round the dining-room door and listened to them as they came out of the drawing-room.

My mother was laughing gaily and talking in her front-door voice.

‘He’s just a little butterfly, you know — just a butterfly!’

Miss replied judiciously.

‘We had better let that go for a while.’

So let go it was. I looked at books or pictures, and made up words, dongbulla for a carthorse; drew ships, and aeroplanes with all their strings, and waited for the bell.

I had quickly narrowed my interest in school to the quarter of an hour between eleven and fifteen minutes past. This was Break, when our society at last lived up to my expectations. While Miss sat at her desk and drank tea, we spent the Break playing and fighting in the space between the desks and the door. The noise rose slowly in shrillness and intensity, so that I could soon assess the exact note at which Miss would ring a handbell and send us back to our books. If we were dull and listless, Break might be extended by as much as ten minutes; so there was a constant conflict in my mind — a desire to be rowdy, and a leader in rowdiness, together with the knowledge that success would send us back to our desks. The games were numerous and varied with our sex. The girls played with dolls or at weddings. Most of the time they played Postman’s Knock among themselves — played it seriously, like a kind of innocent apprenticeship.

We boys ignored them with a contempt of inexpressible depth. We did not kiss each other, not we. We played tag or fought in knots and clusters, while Miss drank tea and smiled indulgently and watched our innocent apprenticeship.

Fighting proved to be just as delightful as I had thought. I was chunky and zestful and enjoyed hurting people. I exulted in victory, in the complete subjugation of my adversary, and thought that they should enjoy it too — or at least be glad to suffer for my sake. For this reason, I was puzzled when the supply of opponents diminished. Soon, I had to corner victims before I could get a fight at all.

Imperceptibly the gay picture altered. Once back in our desks, where the boys were safe from me, they laughed at me, and sniggered. I became the tinder to a catch word. Amazed, behind my eager fists, I watched them and saw they were — but what were they? Appearances must lie; for of course they could not drive themselves from behind those aimed eyes, could not persuade themselves that I, ego Billy, whom everyone loved and cherished, as by nature, could not persuade themselves that I was not uniquely woven of precious fabric —

Could it be?

Nonsense! Sky, fly, pie, soup, hoop, croup — geourgeous.

But there were whisperings in corners and on the stairs. There were cabals and meetings. There were conversations which ceased when I came near. Suddenly in Break, when I tried to fight, the opposition fled with screams of hysterical laughter, then combined in democratic strength and hurled itself on my back. As for the little girls, they no longer played Postman’s Knock, but danced on the skirts of the scrum, and screamed encouragement to the just majority.

That Break ended early. When we were back at our desks, I found my rubber was gone, and no one would lend me another. But I needed a rubber, so I chewed up a piece of paper and used that. Miss detected my fault and cried out in mixed horror and amusement. Now the stigma of dirt was added to the others.

At the end of the morning I was left disconsolate in my desk. The other boys and girls clamoured out purposefully. I wandered after them, puzzled at a changing world. But they had not gone far. They were grouped on the cobbles of the alley, outside the door. The boys stood warily in a semi-circle, their satchels swinging loose like inconvenient shillelaghs. The girls were ranged behind them, ready to send their men into the firing line. The girls were excited and giggling, but the boys were pale and grim.

‘Go on!’ shouted the girls, ‘go on!’

The boys took cautious steps forward.

Now I saw what was to happen — felt shame, and the bitterest of all my seven beings. Humiliation gave me strength. A rolled-up exercise book became an epic sword. I went mad. With what felt like a roar, but must really have been a pig-squeal, I leapt at the nearest boy and hit him squarely on the nose. Then I was round the semi-circle, hewing and thumping like Achilles in the river bed. The screams of the little girls went needle sharp. A second or two later, they and the boys were broken and running up the alley, piling through the narrow entry, erupting into the street.

I stood alone on the cobbles and a wave of passionate sorrow engulfed me. Indignation and affront, shame and frustration took command of my muscles and my lungs. My voice rose in a sustained howl, for all the world as though I had been the loser, and they had chased Achilles back to his tent. I began to zigzag up the alley, head back, my voice serenading a vast sorrow in the sky. My feet found their way along the High Street, and my sorrow went before me like a brass band. Past the Antique Shoppe, the International Stores, Barclay’s Bank; past the tobacconist’s and the Green Dragon, with head back, and grief as shrill and steady as a siren——

How can one record and not invent? Is there any point in understanding the nature of a small boy crying? Yet if I am to tell the small, the unimportant truth, it is a fact that my sorrows diminished unexpectedly and woefully up the street. What had been universal, became an army with banners, became soon so small that I could carry it before me, as it were, in two hands. Still indignant, still humiliated, still moving zigzag, with little running impulses and moments of pause, I had my grief where I could hold it out and see it — look! Some complexity of nature added three persons to my seven devils — or perhaps brought three of the seven to my notice. There was Billy grieving, smitten to the heart; there was Billy who felt the unfairness of having to get this grief all the way home where his mother could inspect it; and there was scientific Billy, who was rapidly acquiring know-how.

I suspected that my reservoirs were not sufficient for the waters of lamentation, suspected that my voice would disappear, and that I was incapable of a half-mile’s sustained emotion. I began to run, therefore, so that my sorrow would last. When suspicion turned to certainty, I cut my crying to a whimper and settled to the business of getting it home. Past the Aylesbury Arms, across the London Road, through Oxford Street by the Wesleyan Chapel, turn left for the last climb in the Green — and there my feelings inflated like a balloon, so that I did the last twenty yards as tragically as I could have wished, swimming through an ocean of sorrow, all, paradoxically enough, quite, quite genuine — swung on the front door knob, stumbled in, staggered to my mother —

‘Why, Billy! Whatever’s the matter?’

— balloon burst, floods, tempests, hurricanes, rage and anguish — a monstrous yell —

‘THEY DON’T LIKE ME!’

My mother administered consolation and the hesitant suggestion that perhaps some of the transaction had been my fault. But I was beyond the reach of such footling ideas. She comforted, my father and Lily hovered, until at last I was quiet enough to eat. My mother put on her enormous hat and went out with an expression of grim purpose. When she came back, she said she thought everything would be all right. I continued to eat and sniff and hiccup. I brooded righteously on what was going to happen to my school-fellows now that my mother had taken a hand. They were, I thought, probably being sent to bed without anything to eat, and it would serve them right and teach them to like me and not be cruel. After lunch, I enjoyed myself darkly (scaffole, birk, rake), inventing possible punishments for them — lovely punishments.

Miss called later and had a long talk with my mother in the drawing-room. As she left, I stuck my field of ripe corn round the dining-room door again and saw them.

‘Bring him along a quarter of an hour late,’ said Miss. ‘That’s all I shall need.’

My mother inclined her stately head.

‘I know the children don’t really mean any harm — but Billy is so sensitive.’

We were back to normal again, then. That night, I suffered my usual terrors; but the morning came and I forgot them again in the infinite promise of day. Lily took me to school a quarter of an hour later than usual. We went right in, right upstairs. Everyone was seated and you could have stuck a fork into the air of noiseless excitement. I sat in my desk, Lily went, and school began. Wherever I looked there were faces that smiled shyly at me. I inspected them for signs of damage but no one seemed to have suffered any crippling torment. I reached for a rubber, and a girl in pink and plaits leaned over.

‘Borrow mine.’

A boy offered me a handkerchief. Another passed me a note with ‘wil you jine my ggang’ written on it. I was in. We began to say our tables and I only had to pause for breath before giving an answer to six sevens for a gale of whispers to suggest sums varying from thirty-nine to forty-five. Dear Miss had done her work well, and today I should enjoy hearing her fifteen minutes’ homily on brotherly love. Indeed, school seemed likely to come to a full stop from sheer excess of charity; so Miss, smiling remotely, said we would have an extra long break. My heart leapt, because I thought that now we could get on with some really fierce, friendly fighting, with even a bloody nose. But Miss produced a train set. When the other boys got down to fixing rails, the girls, inexpressibly moved by the homily, seized me in posse. I never stood a chance against those excited arms, those tough, silken chests, those bird-whistling mouths, that mass of satin and serge and wool and pigtails and ribbons. Before I knew where I was, I found myself, my cornflowers popping out of my head, playing Postman’s Knock.

The first girl to go outside set the pattern.

‘A parcel for Billy Golding!’

In and out I went like a weaver’s shuttle, pecked, pushed, hugged, mouthed and mauled, in and out from fair to dark to red, from Eunice who had had fever and a crop, to big Martha who could sit on her hair.

I kissed the lot.

This was, I suppose, my first lesson; and I cannot think it was successful. For I did not know about the homily, I merely felt that the boys and girls who tried to do democratic justice on me had been shown to be wrong. I was, and now they knew it, a thoroughly likeable character. I was unique and precious after all; and I still wondered what punishments their parents had found for them which had forced them to realize the truth.

I still refused to do my lessons, confronting Miss with an impenetrable placidity. I still enjoyed fighting if I was given the chance. I still had no suspicion that Billy was anything but perfect. At the end of term, when I went down to Cornwall, I sat in a crowded carriage with my prize book open on my knees for six hours (keroube, serrap, konfeederul), so that passengers could read the inscription. I am reading it now: