I was the middle child of three, but there was a gap of five years on either side, and I hardly saw my father before I was eight. For this and other reasons I was somewhat lonely. I had the lonely child’s habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued. I knew that I had a natural ability with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life.
However, the quantity of serious writing which I produced all through my childhood would not add up to half a dozen pages. I wrote my first poem at the age of four or five, my mother taking it down to dictation. I cannot remember anything about it except that it was about a tiger and the tiger had “chair-like teeth” - a good enough expression. At eleven, when the war of 1914-18 broke out, I wrote a poem which was printed in the local newspaper, as was another, two years later, on the death of Kitchener. From time to time, when I was a bit older, I wrote bad and usually unfinished “nature poems”. I also, about twice, attempted a short story which was a failure. That was the total of the would-be serious work that I actually set down on paper during all those years.
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