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The world was all before. The iron gates of my Paradise clanged to behind me as I walked, alone, solitary in my anonymous glory to face the dawn of the freedom for which I had waited so long. Were there not millions of others? No; I only knew what it was like to be me. No one knew that terrible fear; no one could know how it felt, how awful that first night at the prep school, Search-the-Scriptures Sunday classes, the Sunday ‘tuck’ in the gym, crawling over the horrible bar with the concrete floor below, the ‘summer suns are glowing’ but not for me. “Oh, not again!” Exactly; not again. No more; no, never more.
I knew that tunnel at Bishopsgate. Once it used to open out into the sunshine. There breaks a yet more glorious day. And this – dark, sodden, sulphurous Liverpool Street – was it. Surely it must be a pool whose stench-borne waters close over one for ever. So like the shellhole – no, no; not yet. That was later; or long ago; take your choice. Now I stepped out into the glorious company of the umbrella-bearing Saints. England at War. Myself with nothing but my tiny little public-school soul. “Let us run with enlarged hearts”, the Headmaster used to beseech our inconsiderately unmedical Maker. “Animula, vagula, blandula …” Did Hadrian really feel like that? That was a long time ago, and not in Liverpool Street with the rain pouring relentlessly, icily down. A great big boy like you! These buses! Not one … ah, here – Russell Square? “T'other way chum”. Someone's umbrella emptied itself down my neck. Mustn't say “damn”, damn it!
I got there. In my parent's bedroom the electric light cast its livid warmth; they were glad to see me – that I knew. But I could feel that her boy's precocious departure for the war left my mother kissing a chitinous semblance of a boy from whom a person had escaped. But I was imprisoned, unable to break out of the shell which adhered to
me. 'Couvre-toi de gloire!', but how loudly my unjesting soul said, 'Couvre-toi de flannelle', despite