1.
From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or
six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer.
Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four
I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the
consciousness that I was outraging
my true nature and that sooner or later I should have
to settle down and write books.
2.
I was the middle child of three, but there was a gap
of five years on either side, and I barely saw my
father before I was eight. For this and other reasons
I was somewhat lonely, and I soon developed disagreeable
mannerisms
which made me unpopular
throughout my schooldays. 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 facility
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. Nevertheless the volume of serious
-- i.e. seriously intended -- writing which I produced
all through my childhood and boyhood would not amount
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 phrase, but I fancy the
poem was a plagiarism
of Blake's "Tiger, Tiger." At eleven, when
the war of 1914 -- 18 broke out, I wrote a patriotic
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"
in the Georgian
style. I also, about twice, attempted a short
story which was a ghastly
failure. That was the total of the would-be serious
work that I actually set down on paper during all
those years. 
