I seem to have left out a school. It was in North Wales, right away in the hills behind Llanbedr. It was the first time I had been away from home. I went there just for a term, for my health. Here I had my first beating. The headmaster was a parson, and he caned me on the bottom because I learned the wrong collect one Sunday by mistake. This was the first time that I had come upon forcible training in religion. (At my dame’s school we learned collects too, but were not punished for mistakes; we competed for prizes—ornamental texts to take home and hang over our beds.) There was a boy at this school called Ronny, and he was the greatest thing that I had ever met. He had a house at the top of a pine tree that nobody else could climb, and a huge knife, made from the top of a scythe that he had stolen; and he killed pigeons with a catapult and cooked them up in the tree. He was very kind to me; he went into the Navy afterwards and deserted on his first voyage and was never heard of again. He used to steal rides on cows and horses that he found in the fields. And I found a book that had the ballads of ‘Chevy Chace’ and ‘Sir Andrew Barton’ in it; they were the first two real poems that I remember reading. I saw how good they were. But, on the other hand, there was an open-air swimming bath where all the boys bathed naked, and I was overcome by horror at the sight. There was one boy there of nineteen with red hair, real bad, Irish, red hair all over his body. I had not known that hair grew on bodies. And the headmaster had a little daughter with a little girl friend, and I was in a sweat of terror whenever I met them; because, having no brothers, they once tried to find out about male anatomy from me by exploring down my shirt-neck when we were digging up pig-nuts in the garden. Another frightening experience of this part of my life was when I had once to wait in the school cloakroom for my sisters, who went to the Wimbledon High School. We were going on to be photographed together. I waited about a quarter of an hour in the corner of the cloakroom. I suppose I was about ten years old, and hundreds and hundreds of girls went to and fro, and they all looked at me and giggled and whispered things to each other. I knew they hated me, because I was a boy sitting in the cloakroom of a girls’ school, and when my sisters arrived they looked ashamed of me and quite different from the sisters I knew at home. I realized that I had blundered into a secret world, and for months and even years afterwards my worst nightmares were of this girls’ school, which was always filled with coloured toy balloons. ‘Very Freudian,’ as one says now. My normal impulses were set back for years by these two experiences. When I was about seventeen we spent our Christmas holidays in Brussels. An Irish girl staying at the same _pension_ made love to me in a way that I see now was really very sweet. I was so frightened I could have killed her.