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Religion was a sore trial. It was difficult to avoid the certainty that I would be a sore trial to God if he knew about my existence. Sometimes, as when I laughed at Freddie treading on the feet of boys saying their prayers, I thought He might suppose that my involvement was more active than in fact it had been. Dean Farrar contributed to my suspicion of God, and my suspicion of God – “I haven't done anything; really I haven't” – gave ghastly reality to Eric's school in which the mortality should have attracted the attention of authority.
The sense of brooding disaster was made real by the tragic life, unknowable by us, of our headmaster. He was a man of whom my father, like others, was very fond. How my father came to know him, since his visits to England were infrequent, I do not know, but so it was. Masters from the main school visited him regularly; one in particular played billiards with him once a week on a miniature table – the one luxury he possessed. The weekly click of the billiard balls exercised us curiously and was the signal for giggles which I did not understand.
The story circulated by one boy, that Hirst had married in his early twenties a girl of twenty-one who had to be admitted immediately to a mental hospital, I discovered years later to be true. To my contemporaries of nine and ten this story meant no more than any other fact about ‘Old Nigger’ – our name for him – such as that he wore carpet slippers, or a new tie, or – as I announced loudly one day as I scrambled upstairs to bed, unaware that I was helping myself by clutching the leg of his trousers – “Old Nigger says it's to be a half holiday tomorrow!” “Oh no he didn't”, said the trouser leg gruffly; I let go hurriedly. “Ooh sir, sorry sir!” I said, filled with confusion but
not afraid, for he was not a man one feared – though I had been afraid of him when he said I might have to be sent away if I ‘wiggled’. Well, he must have known because his wife had been sent away. It could not have bee